I'm not a journalist but I do sympathize with these types of mistakes in the media. Journalists have two essential parts to their roles: (1) understand the topi

I'm not a journalist but I do sympathize with these types of mistakes in the media. Journalists have two essential parts to their roles: (1) understand the topic, (2) communicate the topic. The issue that comes up again and again is that journalists are not really qualified to do (1). Many issues and topics that journalists report on require expertise, a PhD, or just years of investigation to deeply understand. Compounding the difficulty is that journalists report to non-experts in two ways. Their direct bosses are other journalists. Their indirect bosses are the consumers of media, 99.99% are non-experts. If 99.99% of your customers don't know or care about the details you will naturally put less attention towards the details. We need to stop pretending that reading/watching/listening to the news is somehow informative or educational. Every piece of journalism is, at some level, fiction trying to masquerade as non-fiction. One way to fix this is to encourage more experts to directly communicate with the public. This has the opposite problem, since most experts are not skilled at communicating their expertise to a wide audience. Ultimately a healthy society requires a balance of the two. I'm firmly in the camp that we currently have too many non-experts trying to communicate expertise.