The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse when you consider who gets counted as “important”. For example, the victims of train accidents appear on television as authorities on rail policy and celebrities endorse presidential campaigns as though they are expert on politics. It’s sheer insanity.

—Get it right! (New Scientist)

A great suggestion from Ron Zeno. I can’t find a date on the page, but Ron says the article appeared just before the CBS News document incident.