You Already Know the Media Gets Things Wrong. You Just Forget It the Moment the Topic Changes.

The pattern this names is specific and uncomfortably common: a reader with genuine expertise in a subject reads a news article about that subject, notices clear factual errors or oversimplifications, and concludes the coverage on this particular topic was sloppy. Then they turn the page to an article on an unrelated topic — foreign policy, medicine, another industry — and read it with full, unadjusted trust.

The obvious inconsistency almost never gets noticed in the moment, because the skepticism earned from direct expertise doesn't generalize automatically to unfamiliar topics covered by the exact same publication, using the exact same editorial process, likely with the exact same error rate.

Applying this consistently is uncomfortable, because it means treating coverage of unfamiliar topics with roughly the same skepticism as coverage of familiar ones — not necessarily distrust, but an acknowledgment that the error rate you've personally observed in your area of expertise is probably a reasonable estimate for everything else too, not an isolated exception.