Gell-Mann amnesia
You read a news article in your area of expertise, see it's wrong, then turn the page and trust the rest.
Named by Michael Crichton, who attributed the observation to physicist Murray Gell-Mann. The phenomenon: any time you read coverage of a topic you know well, the coverage is full of errors. Yet readers immediately turn to the next article (on something they don't know well) and trust it. The amnesia is forgetting that the source was wrong about the area you can evaluate.
The implication is uncomfortable. If the news is wrong about every topic you know about, it's probably wrong about most of the topics you don't know about either. Trusting the news on subjects outside your competence is a leap that the data inside your competence doesn't support.
For operators, the discipline is to apply your in-area skepticism to out-of-area coverage too. Most news consumption underweights this and produces overconfident beliefs about topics no one in the chain actually understands.
Examples in the wild
Industry news coverage is full of errors visible to insiders. The same publications cover other industries with similar accuracy levels. Worth knowing before forming strong opinions based on coverage.
Financial journalism is famously unreliable on specifics. Investors who use it as primary research consistently underperform investors who don't.
Most things you 'know' from news coverage are at most partially accurate. The confidence we feel about distant topics is unwarranted by the source quality.
Gell-Mann amnesia is one of the mental models we apply through real cases inside the Pareto MBA — a part-time program for professionals who want to think clearly about business.