From discussing the mandatory versatility a journalist needs to possess, we arrived at domain expertise. Suddenly I remembered this phenomenon I had read about but had forgotten since – which in retrospect is quite the proof of principle.

When you have expertise in a certain domain, sometimes you happen to run into a mainstream media article that concerns that domain. All too often, you have to conclude that the author has a limited understanding of the situation, at best. This is entirely understandable, after all, you had your whole career to accumulate domain expertise, while the journalist only has a timespan of days to weeks. But this is not the point.

The interesting thing happens when you – shaking your head in disbelief – turn the page. You read the next article, on which you possess no domain expertise, without any restraint or concern. As if you weren’t dumbstruck just now. There is a name for this phenomenon which was coined in 2002 by Michael Crichton (most notably of ER and Jurassic Park fame). He named it the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect – after physicist Murray Gell-Mann – and describes it 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.”

Now that I have written it down, hopefully, I’ll remember.