The question is whether the writer has any clue what they are talking about either.

Also known as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect, where you realize how terribly inaccurate reporting is on topics you know well, but assume that surely they do better for other topics.

They used to have a Wikipedia article about it, but I guess the censors decided it didn't warrant mention anymore. Here is a random article I found on the topic [1].

[1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

I remember this article on Wikipedia. Look at what it is now: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...

A redirect to the article for Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame; unfortunately it appears to have been removed from that page as well. It looks like Crichton is the one who actually came up with the effect, and named it after Gell-Man after discussing it with him.

Here is the page on the edit immediately before being removed from Gell-Mann's article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murray_Gell-Mann&...

And here is the best mention of the effect currently in a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeches_by_Michael_Crichton#G...

Doing some more detective work, the history for the actual article is here [1].

Looks like someone named Wugapodes decided it wasn't an article worth having back in August 2019.

Here is a version from August 2018 that looks about like I remember [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...

It is surely the case that a large amount of secondary writing on academic subjects is bad. This is why I suggest getting feedback from experts instead of building heuristics about topics outside ones field of expertise.