Why, when I realize that journalists misrepresent topics that I know about, do I trust them to accurately cover issues that I don’t know much about?
I’ve thought about that question for years but didn’t realize until yesterday that the late novelist Michael Crichton coined a related term for this: the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
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.
(Via: James Joyner)
August 17th, 2011 | 11:49 am
I think there is a lot to this. I was in a small union that went on strike, and for reasons I won’t go into here, it was newsworthy enough to be covered in The New York Times and Time Magazine. They got the issues about 80% right. When I thought about writing letters to the editor, though, I realized the coverage was good enough, and nobody would really care about my clarifications.
I remember someone, I think from The New York Times, saying there ought to be a notice on the front page of the paper every day saying, “We estimate that today’s coverage is 83% accurate” (or whatever). Journalism, especially in the daily papers, but even in the news weeklies, rarely has the definitive word on anything. If you really want to be well informed, you have to get your news from multiple sources. I do think the major papers and magazines do about as good a job as can be expected.
There are a number of recurrent things that I find particularly annoying, though, and one of them is health-related stories that say something like, “A major new study following 40 thousand people over the course of 30 years indicates that eating a carrot a week can prevent cancer and heart disease and increase lifespan by 30 years.” Then later in the story “experts” caution people not to change their carrot-eating habits. Another type of story is the one that promises the latest findings on some topic of interest (dreams, sleep research, exercise, treatment of anxiety or depression) which begins with a little case history about someone with a problem, and proceeds to tell you what you already know: “The highest quality sleep is attained by controlling your sleep environment. The bedroom should be neither too warm nor too cold and should be isolated from loud noises like construction-site dynamite blasts or nearby freight trains. Most people find it more refreshing to sleep in a prone position and away from bright or flashing lights.”
August 17th, 2011 | 4:05 pm
[...] about some journalism-bashing? The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: whenever we know enough about a subject to judge, we always find newspapers to be seriously [...]
August 17th, 2011 | 4:31 pm
I guess I don’t have this amnesia. The fields I know something about are computer software, military science, and religion. I gave up on American newsweeklies because they couldn’t get any of the three right. The Economist manages to get the first two right most of the time and even religion some of the time, so I’ve stuck with it though it too slowly seem to be descending into infotainment.
August 17th, 2011 | 9:13 pm
Thanks for your comments David. I enjoyed them. I would add the article written by an expert whose expertise is 5-10 years out of date. Happens all the time in international adoption stories written by folks who adopted years ago and haven’t bothered taking notice of the new rules/regulations/norms.
August 23rd, 2011 | 5:31 am
[...] Joe Carter, via a string of other blogs, quotes the late Michael Crichton’s 2002 essay “Why Speculate?”: 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.) [...]
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