What is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect? The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect was coined by author Michael Crichton, who named it after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. The phenomenon describes how people critically evaluate media coverage in their area of expertise, find it lacking, but then uncritically accept the same media’s coverage in other domains. As Crichton described it: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well… 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… Then you 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. ...