'Years ago I was talking to a friend who's a doctor, and he said that the inaccuracy of medical stuff on TV infuriated him. I made some comment about the demands of drama, and he said, "No, the news!" He said just about every medical story was botched by the three networks and the cable networks, botched utterly, and cited examples that would be clear to any doc. "Why can't they be as accurate about medicine as they are about other stuff?"
That got me thinking. I have pretty deep knowledge in several areas, but the deepest are probably aviation and military operations, particularly special operations. And everything about the areas I know best are always misreported on the news. So I started to ask other people... businessmen, cops, lawyers, engineers. And everybody has the same problem.
Namely, we know that everything they report about our domain is bull. But we assume that the stuff they report about other domains must be accurate. Why that assumption?
In fact, it's all bull. Sometimes it's bull because they were careless or sloppy, and sometimes bull because they set out to report the story with it already framed in their little C+ English undergrad minds. But always bull.'
Kevin R.C. 'Hognose' O'Brien
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'Kevin R.C. 'Hognose' O'Brien wrote, "Namely, we know that everything they report about our domain is bull. But we assume that the stuff they report about other domains must be accurate. Why that assumption?"
Michael Crichton in Why Speculate? calls 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."
The rest of the article is worth reading.
Posted by: Looking Glass at December 12, 2007 09:24 PM'
These are two comments from http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/249157.php
(Hat Tip instapundit)
Is it time we had a new paradigm in the news media? One where all the news gets reported by people who know what they are talking about? Is that just too darn revolutionary?
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