Gell-Mann amnesia effect
I&#x27;m a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for <i>newspapers</i>. The problem seems to me that not every topic is covered in the same way by journalists and that the journalists are usually also specializing in particular topics and don&#x27;t just write anywhere.<p>A science journalist has usually studied some natural science but has to cover all of them and has to simplify a lot, so a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as &quot;which government decided what&quot; and &quot;which spokesperson of some organisation said what when&quot;. It&#x27;s much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway, than describing news about theoretical physics to laymen in terms that are 100% accurate to a physicist.<p>In a nutshell, I&#x27;m not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way.<p>Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies.  I&#x27;ve never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&amp;paste news aggregators or bloggers.<p>At some point you&#x27;ve got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!) unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story. Most botched reports get corrected very fast anyway.