Quote of the Day - The 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. – Michael Crichton

The first time I encountered an example of a journalist with absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues of something I knew well was in the early 1980s. I was working at the Navigation Console during Shuttle missions, and the Shuttle was flying its first secret military mission. (Yes, they had a few prior to 1986.)

NASA was not discussing the payload or the mission's purpose. All of us working the mission were cautioned against talking to the press. (No problem for me.) There was wild press speculation about what was happening (some of which verged on Giant Sharks with Space Lasers territory).

The capper (for me) came after the Shuttle landed. The Shuttle's trajectory was nor secret. It had to be reported to the IAU, then headquartered in Paris. The IAU had already published the orbital elements. The Shuttle was landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In order to use excess energy post deorbit burn, the Orbiter was doing a wide loop north. It was going to passing well north of Houston - somewhere between Huntsville and Conroe, as I recall.

Some genius in the press saw that and concluded the Orbiter had be launched in a high inclination orbit. Drawing a straight line between Huntsville and Kennedy he assumed it was overflying the Baikonur Kosmodrome during the mission. (This was the Soviet Union's main spaceport.) That meant it had an orbital inclination of 46 degrees. Wrote it up in a front page story in The Houston Chronicle (might have been the Post) with wild speculations as to why we were overflying the USSR's biggest spaceport.

Except, as I stated earlier, the IAU had already published the trajectory. The mission was flown in a 28.5 degree inclination orbit. It was launched due east of KSC - the standard Shuttle inclination at that time. When this was pointed out, this genius insisted there must have been a plane change. An 18 degree plane change would have been physically impossible for an Orbiter in any orbit. You either launch to 46 degrees or you cannot get there. There were (of course) no adverse impacts on the career of the journalist writing this story.

My reaction when reading the story was thinking that if the US military was as incompetent as the US press the Soviets would have occupied Omaha (Strategic Air Command headquarters) years and years ago. (We were in a cold war with the USSR at the time.) Unlike Crichton, my further reaction was not to read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate than what I knew was obviously wrong. It was to make me deeply suspicious of everything else I read in the news (except perhaps the funnies and the crossword puzzle).

Donald Douglas used to say about airliners: "If the tray tables are dirty and broken, passengers wonder about the state of the landing gear and flaps." In the same way, ever after, I wondered if they made this big an error about basic facts in a story I knew something about, how trustworthy could they be in stories where I had to depend upon them?