It's also a frustrating argument. What does it actually say? "Journalists are often wrong". No shit! That's why it's called "the first draft of history". Meanwhile, everybody is often wrong. But we don't have a "Djikstra amnesia" to describe all the times we fall short of the ideals of our own discipline, but forget about that when holding other people to our notional ideals of their disciplines.

Journalists, unlike say bloggers or marketers or think tank authors or pundits, have a fairly robust ethics/rules system about how to publish. Does it fail them at times? Of course, but do they fail at a higher % than other outlets?

I’ve never seen any actual evidence to suggest that. That there is a pithy quote from a Nobel prize winner isn’t interesting.

There isn't even that! The Nobel laureate is just part of the schtick.

Perhaps we should?

(And then, of course, someone can post:

> Nitpick: Its Djikstra amnesia, tptacek's name for Edsger Djikstra's amnesiatic behavior, not an effect discovered or promoted by Djikstra.

when it eventually gets rounded to "Djikstra effect".)

Fortunately, most journalism is useless for information transmission and likely rarely alters behaviour - the latter having been chosen first with the journalism being used as justification. To that degree, the fact that most journalists are usually low quality information sources is not particularly dangerous since you never use them to do anything different from what you'd do.

There are lots and lots of people undecided about an issue, reading some journalistic drivel. They are most easily influenced on that undecided issue.