My browser history over the past few months is riddled with 20-minute bursts of trying to find the wikipedia page for a certain cognitive fallacy that is related to what you and your parent comment are talking about.

The gist of it is that we tend to trust the authority of the media, up until a point where the the media incorrectly or disingenuously reports on something that we are an expert on. This theory disagrees with what you and your parent comment are saying and instead contends that as soon as they switch to another story, we continue to trust their authority on other topics without any kind of diminished reputation.

I feel like I'm going crazy, but I am almost certain this page exists and my google-fu is continually failing me.

How about this: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

Yes! That's it! Thank you!

I'm amazed that this is actually not an established theory, as I believed it to be. It explains why this doesn't have a wikipedia article, because it's really just the musing of some guy.

http://english.stackexchange.com/posts/244277/revisions

I think it's pretty well established, for example, Heinlein writes about the same concept in his 1980 Expanded Universe (and it might have been from the text in an earlier version), saying the news magazine Time, I think it was, had never gotten it right in the situations he had eye-witnessed.

Thing is, it's just not going to be acknowledged by large groups of people; for example Wikipedians won't like it because it totally undercuts what what they base verifiability on.

What's your country if you don't mind me asking?