Dowsing for news

[ahoneycutt]

The newspaper I work for is running an article tonight about dowsing. It's an AP (Associated Press) article that they're obviously using for filler. The article reads like it's saying that dowsing isn't junk science, which is grating on my nerves. The article is titled "Ancient practice in demand for water" and talks about the drought in Utah being a boon for dowsers. Now here's the problem, here's a little exceprt from the article:

“There it is,” he said, turning to the two men — one the landowner and the other a well driller — who had followed him up the slope. “Your underground stream runs right through here. And there’s plenty of water,” he said.

It doesn't say whether or not they find anything. The sane thing the article says, as if a side note, is that some people are skeptical of the practice, "Although some may question the wisdom of relying on the twitching of a willow branch..."

Anyway, is this something I should gripe about to the editors? Any thoughts on why I should or should not?

Thanks!

ETA:

I guess this is old(er) news. You can go here to read the entire article (apparently ours was cut short a bit.)
Link - Salt Lake Tribune

 

[Nucular]

Yeah, I'd have thought griping to the editors would be a cool thing to do! As long as it doesn't jeopardise your job or anything.

Dowsing is one of those topics that many sceptical but ignorant-of-this-sort-of-thing people for some reason think has been proven and explained - I've lost count of the amount of conversations I've had with intelligent people where we have to go right back to the beginning with dowsing, and explain that, no, it has nothing to do with gravity or magnetism, it simply has never, ever been shown to work.

Articles like this annoy me - I had a letter published a couple of months ago in BBC Focus science magazine responding to their woefully credulous article on dowsing, written of all people by John Gribbin, a famous physicist!

There's a chance that your editors are simply unaware that dowsing is woo, and I guess they could even be interested in balancing their error by including a more critical article next time? Should at least generate some controversy if they do!

There's also a nice little section on dowsing here on this very website, which can be very informative for people who had no idea it might not work.

Hope you can make a difference

 

[ahoneycutt]

Well, better late than never. I did speak to the main copy editor that evening, but it was too late to change anything. Newspapers run on a really tight schedule, and I was off by about an hour or two if we wanted to do something about it. Apparently, someone grabbed the story as filler. Now, they are supposed to do a couple of reads of the content they are going to use, and I guess whoever was working that story that night didn't seem to feel the need to include the rest of the story in any way. They are actually supposed to paraphrase if it's a story like that where it has two differing perspectives.

That said, if you check out the link that I posted, they interviewed Randi for the article and he provides some good info. I only wish that they (the newspaper I work for) had run at least a little bit of the facts disproving dowsing.

The next morning my girlfriend and roomate and I were discussing the article and I was telling them how things of this nature tend to make me a little edgy; it seems to be something that dumbs down human knowledge. After expressing my thoughts on this, my roomate told me how she not too long ago had gone out to her friend's farm and they were dowsing. She related that she had dowsed all the way to the well and was correct. Her friend told her that, "Yeah, my main water well is right under you." She couldn't be persuaded that dowsing is a bunch of BS, but oh well. My girlfriend and she are both pretty wooish anyhow.

-Andy