Layers and Layers of Fact Checkers and Editors

From Ed Driscoll of PJ Media:

Take a good look at the headline of the above page of yesterday’s Washington Post music section, and in the caption underneath the photo. Now take a look at the name on headstock of the guitar pictured. (Click to enlarge photo if necessary.) Note that they don’t match. While he might get blamed for it, the error very likely isn’t the author’s fault. Presumably, he turned in his article, an editor or his assistant went through the Post’s photo morgue to find photos of one of the superstar guitarists mentioned, recognized Jeff Beck’s name, and pasted in a recent image.

Glenn Reynolds emailed me the above photo, which was sent to him by one of his readers, who noted in his email to Glenn:

Seriously, if your gonna run an article on the Fender Stratocaster Jeff Beck is about as grand a Strat playing guitar god to showcase in a photo as you could find. And of course, that would be pretty easy to do. If you couldn’t, it would be nice if they at least had him playing a Fender.

But a Gibson hollow body ?!?!?!?

Hey, don’t knock ‘em — those Gibson hollow body Stratocasters are awesome guitars, and they fit very easily into the limited trunk space of a Chevrolet Mustang. And who can forget Eric Hendrix playing the Star-Spangled ‘Tis of Thee on one at Woodmont?

So does anyone at the Post pay attention to details? Driscoll continues:

More seriously, the late Michael Crichton coined the phrase “the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” to describe what the MSM seems to instill into just about all of us:

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. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

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.

I have experienced something similar to this with my profession. I was at a press conference that the head of my department was answering questions from the Press about the failures of some of the infrastructure to a seismic event. I listened to the questions and the answers and then read an article in the newspaper the next day, but only experienced half of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I knew the papers got most of the information wrong and realized, IF the media got it so wrong on a topic that I am an expert on, what else do they get wrong?

That is when I started to question everything presented as "fact" by the media.