I think if you talk to anybody who has been involved in an event covered by the media, you will find stories about how wrong they got it. Sometimes it will be

I think if you talk to anybody who has been involved in an event covered by the media, you will find stories about how wrong they got it. Sometimes it will be facts that are reported incorrectly, others it will be bias introduced to push a particular agenda. In a lot of cases simple editing can frame a sound bite in such a way as to bend the story. I was on a military deployment overseas many years ago, and it was entertaining to see how events were reported back home. It was vary rare for any report to gain more than a parsing resemblance to what actually happened. In a lot of cases many separate events were confounded into a single report and in all cases the subtleties of the event were completely lost. The result is that as you say you cannot take any reporting to be the actual facts of the situation. If you are interested in an event your only recourse is to investigate the event yourself. Talk to participants and observers and even then you have to examine their and your own biases to ensure that is taken into account when drawing your conclusions. Facts are for Mathematics, and even then, that is an opinion.