ABSTRACT
A little ignorance not infrequently helps, especially when foreign correspondents are desperate to round out their dispatches with explanations that represent some semblance of authentic clarity. Experts are even unhappy when a trained “science correspondent” simplifies the result of some medical discovery or suggests the social implications of some new biological data. Anthony W. Marx read the Paris newspapers avidly, and did a number of brilliant and influential pamphlets on the basis of the “first-hand reports” he read therein. Scientists who take time out from their laboratories to scan a daily newspaper express knowledgeable outrage at the misdemeanors in the reporting of the news emerging from their own fields of specialization. A very “little knowledge” is sometimes sufficient, but taken for granted. Journalists' newspapers, being themselves regular victims of “a little knowledge,” are the valuable source for information of the gaps in other people’s mental make-up.
