Gell-Mann Amnesia

 Michael Crichton (yes, that one) made an observation almost twenty years ago. He described something he coined as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

"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 [...] 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.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."

(full text here: http://geer.tinho.net/crichton.why.speculate.txt)

Pick your topic. For Ben Shapiro it is definitely international relations with respect to Israel. You could call him biased, but he definitely has a clear, full, detailed understanding of things on the ground. His video titles could use work if he hopes to change minds, and his show is obviously pickled in opinion (which he doesn't deny), but his vivid and importantly contextualized verbal picture of what's happening in Israel this week is something so glaringly different from the moral equivalency that the media gives it, I beg you to listen for 20 minutes. Then refer to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect above.