3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on the Media Getting Things Wrong
Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy, The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect & Observation Bias
I. Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy
Imagine you witness a car accident first-hand. A day later you read about it in the newspaper. But what you read has little to do with your personal experience from the day before. Here’s journalist Erwin Knoll reminding us about the imperfection of news stories:
Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
—Erwin Knoll, quoted in The New York Times
Put into practice, Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy serves as a reminder that journalists and editors are prone to biases and mistakes just as anyone else. Though the key is not to overgeneralise but to extrapolate from the stories we’ve experienced ourselves. With how many grains of salt should we take the next story based on the accuracy of the article of which we had firsthand knowledge? On a positive note, if a journalist gets our firsthand knowledge of events right, it can be a good indicator of his or her reliability.
II. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
What applies to firsthand knowledge in Knoll’s Law is known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect when it comes to expertise. Here’s author Michael Crichton on our tendency to quickly forget about potential inaccuracies in news stories:
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 refer to 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 is 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 as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
—Michael Crichton, Why Speculate?
III. Observer Bias
It almost seems like humans are not very reliable recording devices. Observer bias can lead to very different accounts of the same events. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us about the dangers of putting too much weight on personal observations:
We know, not only from research and psychology, but simple empirical evidence in the history of science that the lowest form of evidence that exists in this world is eye-witness testimony. Which is scary because that’s some of our highest form of evidence in the court of law.
—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmic Quandaries
On a related note, I’ve written more about intuitive traps and mental shortcuts as common barriers to critical thinking. 🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com