“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.”
My favorite example of that was a guy who used to write for the New York Times, fifteen or twenty years ago. Maybe longer. Can't remember his name.
He wrote stories which were some variation on this: "US Prisons Overcrowded While Crime Rates Fall."
The story that followed this headline would focus on the idea that the criminal justice system was a joke, that prisons were run for profit by the "prison industrial complex" and were full of innocent people, etc.
The NYT would run a version of that story every year.
My favorites are the clueless reporters writing about guns “The gun had a full clip of bullets,” or “Police collected bullets off the sidewalk that were ejected by the shooters gun.” They have no clue what a cartridge is.