Devastating floods have put West Virginia in the news recently, and because I'm from the area, I've been noticing mistakes in the reporting. One source said that 44/54 counties had been declared disaster areas. Well, West Virginia has 55 counties. Another report at one point said that 98% of the state was without electricity. Well, one of the nearby towns to my mother had a 98% outage, not the whole state. Also, there were two places where the flooding was most severe--one on the east side of the state and the other on the west side of the state. The two areas were mixed up sometimes when reporting was done about damages. And of course, place names were said and spelled incorrectly.
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Nobel prize winng physicist
Murray Gell-Mann.--
Crichton said that he named the
amnesia effect after him because
Gell-Man was a famous, well
respected man that would give
the idea some attention. |
These inconsistencies bring up an interesting subject in how we read the news that has been named
The Murray Gell-Man Amnesia Effect. Michael Crichton coined the phrase after he spent an afternoon with physicist, Murray Gell-Mann. They were reading the newspaper and realized that when they read an article about something they knew about, they found all kinds of mistakes. But when they read an article about something they were unfamiliar with, they took the story at face value even though they knew that there were problems with other articles.
On the surface this doesn't make sense. Logically, if you know the reporting is inaccurate in one story, you shouldn't trust any other stories from that source. But that is usually not what we do. We seem to have an amnesia about the mistakes and take the other stories at face value.
I'd like to say that I am a critical consumer of news and don't trust anything I hear or read. But that wouldn't be true. I do listen with a bit of skepticism to some things, but most things I don't. Flooding in North Dakota. Never gave the accuracy of the reporting a second thought. An election in California. Ditto. And so it goes.
Have you ever thought about what reporting you accept as the truth and what you don't?
Yeah, lots of experience with the Murray Gell-Man affect. I've told some others about it who have only mustered a blank look, like "I don't get it."
ReplyDeleteI was trying to find out info on the WV floods because the news reports make it seem like there is all heck breaking loose, but in no particular place. I always end up yelling, "But, where? where is it??" I give up now on all major networks or national sources, and find the nearest local newspaper site on the internet and go there to see what's happening. I can imagine what Ward thinks of all this.
Ouch! "effect." There;'s one of my English teachers rolling over in her grave right now.
DeleteI think that's a good way to get the news through local sources. Sometimes I do that and sometimes I just ignore the news altogether. Not maybe the most responsible thing, but sometimes needed to preserve sanity.
DeleteAnd yes, Ward is very frustrated with most reporting these days. He is a fact checker and a thoughtful person who tries to understand all sides to an issue. It is next to impossible to get a complete, unbiased story these days, so there is a lot of yelling at the TV or internet news feed--by both of us.
Fascinating. I can totally see how that's true.
ReplyDeleteOne time when my step-mom was visiting her family back home in Germany, we got hit with a big blizzard here in Denver. Apparently it was a big enough deal that it made the international news. There was about 3 feet of snow, but somehow it got lost in translation and the German news reported that we'd had 3 METERS of snow! My step-mom figured it was a mistake, but she did call home to check on us just in case!
For once and for all, we should all get on the same measuring system. I'm ready to go metric, but I'm not sure that others are ready for it. For the last 30 years, it has been going to happen any day.
DeleteI can only imagine what your step-mom thought when she heard that you had that much snow.
I agree with Mike H., I was trying to find out where exactly the damage had hit in WV and I couldn't find information about it anywhere on the MSM until today. It was as if none of the big news agency knew anything about WV or cared to find out. "West Virginia" was just a big state without any towns or counties for them.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to say I'm a skeptic when it comes to any news source, but I'm sure i've accepted my share of news at face value. However, if a story is important enough to be reported in the international press, I will always go check what the French newspapers are saying about it because many times the stories will be different. I don't have a concrete example right now but certainly during the Paris terrorist attacks last year.
There have been several instances of major news outlet reporting on stories from parody sites such as "The Onion" because someone at one outlet thought it was a legit story and others just blindly copied what they had published, so we really should trust no one.
I don't know if it's true, but I hear that much of the international free press is much better at getting the story right than here. You suggested that that might be true. Do you think it is?
DeleteThey're biased, much like the newspapers are here, but it's less of a secret in France as most newspapers openly identify with a specific political party. So I still have to make sure to read a variety of newspapers to form my own opinions BUT: I think they tend to analyze things deeper and give more information to their readers than newspapers do here when it comes to international stories. Also in the French press you find stories that never get picked up here, mostly, I think, because American media thinks that most Americans wouldn't care. Consequently, I find most Europeans much more conscious of what's happening in the world than most Americans, me included (i.e. me included as an American!). However, I also get frustrated that the French press is hampered by laws that aim to protect people's privacy and feelings, but that ultimately result in much less freedom of speech than we have here. So... at least with French newspapers, I don't know that they get the story straight-er than here, but I think it's always interesting to see the discrepancies between what's being reported here and what's reported over there. This really doesn't make any sense without concrete examples and I'm sorry to say that I don't have any right now. I do know, though, that several times I have read important headlines in French newspapers at least a couple of days before they hit the papers over here and you're wondering why the delay... sometimes I wonder if they're getting "vetted" before being released for official consumption and I start to sound like a conspiracy nut, lol. But it's probably that someone at the AP didn't think that such and such story was of much interest and then since they all copy each other, no one else picks it up either.
DeleteDissemination of information is really a complicated issue as you just addressed. It deserves a lot more attention that it gets.
DeleteI don't think the news is very accurate most of the time, but thanks for pointing out the obvious errors in the reporting on W. Virginia.
ReplyDeleteBecause of competition everywhere, I think news sources are too eager to be the first to report something and don't spend much time fact checking.
DeleteI absolutely know the news reported is not accurate. probably more times than not. As my parents used to say don't believe everything you read or hear unless you get the information yourself. The pictures on TV of Virginia is just devastating. I can't imagine! Glad your family is safe.
ReplyDeleteI have never personally been involved in a bad flood either although things got pretty close when we lived in New Orleans. So it's hard for me to imagine exactly what those people are going through also.
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