It is quite stunning to this author how important Joe Rogan has become to our national discourse. It seems well-deserved, mind you, but it is still surprising. And the other day, he had Bill Murray on his show and things immediately got very interesting:
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
Of course, the specific issue Murray has is with Wired: The Short Life & Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward. This is not a new book. Good Reads says it was published in 1984, around two years after Belushi’s death. But Murray felt that the information was so wrong within just the first five pages of the book that he couldn’t take it and stopped reading from there.
Hey, we can relate to that. It is very hard for this author to watch or read something that we believe is fundamentally wrong. This is why we could not force ourselves to watch the movie Double Jeopardy even to laugh at its terrible legal premise.
But we think the more interesting thing is that Murray is basically doing a reverse Gell-Mann. And we weren’t the only person who thought that:
The purest example of the Gell-man amnesia effect being broken. https://t.co/S4ahS2TZAO
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) March 2, 2025
If you aren’t familiar with the term, it comes from the late, great Michael Crichton. This is how he described the phenomenon:
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
So this is Bill Murray doing the opposite—believing that because Woodward’s reporting on Belushi was so terrible it led him to re-evaluate Woodward’s coverage of Nixon.
Dunleavy also had more:
Back in 1984, Bellushi’s manager also said that Woodward’s book made him wonder if Nixon was innocent. pic.twitter.com/RnKZBbov8Q
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) March 2, 2025
He also reposted this with a wide-eyed reaction emoji:
Bill Murray and Bob Woodward had words about Woodward’s Belushi book tonight at the Kennedy Center. It was a little tense.
Also Debbie Dingell and Amy Klobuchar were there pic.twitter.com/52IXQkg4FL
— Ben Terris (@bterris) March 3, 2025
Bob Woodward is completely full of sh*t https://t.co/y4aM4IP3Kf
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) March 1, 2025
They have been holding up Nixon and the poster boy for corruption and criminality for a generation.
The media has been brainwashing America for a generation.
— Caesar (@caesar_pounce) March 2, 2025
Certainly, Nixon had nothing on Joe Biden.
Love Bill Murray’s common sense take on Woodward’s book
he’s right to question the narrative on NixonWoodward’s tactics are shady and it’s time we reexamine history
free from biased reporting and fake news spinGreat share, thanks for posting this clip from Joe Rogan’s…
— Stop Socialist Tyranny (@endlibtyranny) March 1, 2025
The cut off text:
Great share, thanks for posting this clip from Joe Rogan’s podcast
Was lucky enough to see Bill get honored at the Kennedy Center years ago and even ran into him afterwards. He was very friendly.
He told this joke, among many others:
“The best way to teach your kids about taxes is by eating 30% of their ice cream”
— Justin Goodman (@JustinRGoodman) March 2, 2025
Many SNL alums from the earliest days are either libertarians or straight up conservatives. We think this might be why they were much better back then—because there was actual diversity of thought in the cast. They would not have allowed a racist old coot to serve as president for four years without barely saying a word in mockery. They would also find a great deal funny in Trump, too, but modern Saturday Night Live was too afraid of the political impact of the jokes they might tell to make fun of Biden’s obvious failings (until after he dropped out). They care more about having a political impact than being funny.
Given that Belushi died of a drug overdose after going visibly downhill for months, I’d say that Woodward’s unflattering account is probably more accurate than the rose-tinted memories of friends and colleagues.
— Doug Borton (@BortonDoug) March 2, 2025
Except Murray didn’t say that Woodward was being too harsh. He was just saying Woodward wasn’t accurate. We suspect he accepted that any truthful account would be unflattering.
This happened to me with wildfire. You become personally involved in a subject, you quickly see how the NYT and WaPo and LATimes lie about it…you start to ask…what are the odds that they’re only lying about the *one* subject I happen to be able to invalidate…?
Rabbit hole.— Mann Made Cinema (@Hotshot_Movie) March 2, 2025
Better known as the red pill moment.
Everyone’s talking about Bill Murray calling Bob Woodward a liar on Joe Rogan
Me who read @JamesRosenTV‘s original research on ex-Navy intelligence briefer turned journalist Bob Woodward’s history of lies https://t.co/JwKoKcWVua https://t.co/c7rA1GdQlm pic.twitter.com/MDvKbF1JJX— Anang Mittal अनंग मित्तल (@anangbhai) March 2, 2025
We even saw the reaction from another famous person:
Yes, life in the Lennon/Ono household must look very different from the inside.
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