Coined by the late
Michael Crichton:
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally
undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once
discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann*, and by dropping a famous name I
imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would
otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject
you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You
read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding
of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it
actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call
these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In
any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors
in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs,
and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was
somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the
story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That
is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in
other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently
exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In
court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But
when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is
probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact,
it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our
behavior is amnesia.
* Murray Gell-Man received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.
So true, and also annoying are dogmatic personal beliefs disquised as balanced scholarly writing. dm
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