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When I came across Gell-Mann Amnesia I thought, "Wow I needed that concept."

>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.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

This is exactly right. I had detailed knowledge of an acquisition and all media articles about it were so completely wrong that it was offensive.

> Almost every time I read a piece in the mainstream media about something I understand really well I'm baffled at how badly the press machine we've set up (and inexplicably trust) can butcher it. Then I think about that experience the next time I read about something I don't know much about.

This is how I feel about press, movies, TV, etc.

Ditto. I learned the media wasn't a reliable source of information when I was 10. What baffles me is so few people feel this way, even here on hacker news. A large percentage, if not most, of the submitted links on HN come from media outlets.

It's not really an innate trust in media. It's the lack of anything better (and no, (most) blogs don't count) if you want to stay informed.

It's the lack of anything better

That's ridiculous. That's like saying 'I know drinking sea water will kill me, but, being stuck out at sea, there isn't anything else to drink and it's better than nothing.' It's completely false. There are better alternatives and yes, blogs are one of them, but even if there weren't, reading/watching nothing is better than reading/watching the news.

In the good old days, there were just a few news operations. Each had the resources and time to do thorough vetting and deep reporting of each story.

Today, there has been an explosion of news outlets, but each one has little time or resources to do deep reporting. But because there are so many, they are highly incentivized to attack each other's stories, to gain traffic.

I'm not sure that one way is worse than the other, from the audience perspective. Today's news cycle is in some ways more transparent--the first take goes public, then the fact check goes public, then the second take goes public, then the second fact check, etc. And it's all discussed in detail between anyone who's interested--like here on HN, or on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Let's call it a transition from a monolithic "wait until correct" model to a distributed "eventually correct" model.

That said, it may be corrosive to the reputation of news operations in general, because they are so frequently publicly challenged and wrong.

I think reputation matters far less than people think it does in the news industry.

Buzzfeed consistently does as much traffic as all local newspapers combined.

Maybe in the longterm it all evens out, but right now traffic is traffic.

I regret that "eventually" correct is far too optimistic.

However only Fox News, Breitbart, Telegraph and especially Daily Mail with other news outlets I hate is guilty of this and their readers are idiots for reading that junk.

But it's pretty obvious what you brought up doesn't apply to Guardian, Huffington Post Arabic, Vox and Salon which is quality stuff that I like.

It's flawed because we let it be flawed from personal bias. I think it was Spiegler that has around 80 fact checkers all around. What's your take on that?

But yeah, boo Daily Mail, yay Salon because I am smart enough to tell quality from tabloids.

Are you being serious here? I can't tell.

Nah dude, I am just poking fun of someone one complaining about Daily Mail while peddling Guardian and Vox as they were the One True Source with no angle or vested interests.

Okay, no worries!