Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and the ugly truth about media manipulation

It’s unsettling to find that you’ve been lied to.As realization dawns, emotions range from confusion, to shame at having been bamboozled, to anger.Millions of Americans — particularly those who follow celebrity news and not politics — are feeling this way about the media right now, after a holiday break spent tracking the battle between actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

   The “Gell-Mann amnesia effect” describes the tendency we all have to notice errors in news stories about topics we know well, yet to assume trustworthiness when reading articles on topics outside our expertise.Here’s an example: If you’re a sports fan, you’ll notice it if a writer in your local newspaper doesn’t know the difference between a touchdown and a home run.You’ll realize that the writer (and the editor) have no idea what they’re talking about.But you’ll likely drop that realization moments later when you turn to the financial pages or to international news, and trust that same paper’s coverage of topics you know less well. Millions of Americans are suffering from the Gell-Mann amnesia effect when it comes to entertainment coverage — and the Lively-Baldoni fracas is making them feel they’ve been had.When “It Ends With Us,” the domestic violence drama in which the two co-starred, came out in August, social media chatter about Lively turned negative seemingly overnight.

The former “Gossip Girl” star was said to be a bully, a diva, difficult on set.But just before Christmas, Lively filed a bombshell sexual-harassment lawsuit against Baldoni — and her complaint was bolstered by a lengthy, sympathetic New York Times exposé reporting that much of the narrative against her had been planted by Baldoni and his hired PR guns. The story described how publicists shape news coverage over lunches with reporters and dossiers of juicy tidbits.It included text exchanges between two publicists working for Baldoni that appeared to show them scheming ...