LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT’S THE GELL-MANN AMNESIA EFFECT!
Bill Murray on @JoeRogan podcast: "So when I read 'Wired' by whatshisname, Bob Woodward, about John Belushi, I read like five pages of 'Wired' & I went, 'Oh my God, they framed Nixon.' …If he did this to Belushi, what he did to Nixon is probably soiled for me too." Interesting! pic.twitter.com/3NQWgnDprn
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) March 1, 2025
As the late Michael Crichton wrote:
“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.”
Regarding Nixon himself, whom SNL spent the entire second half of the 1970s absolutely savaging, as the late Zhou Enlai never said, the outcome of the French Revolution? Too early to say.