I agree press coverage is suboptimal. But really, press coverage is one of the lower tiers of "reliable source" from Wikipedia's perspective, and cautiously inc

I agree press coverage is suboptimal. But really, press coverage is one of the lower tiers of "reliable source" from Wikipedia's perspective, and cautiously included for mostly pragmatic reasons. Ideally, articles shouldn't be based on press coverage: if you're writing an article about the history of IBM, or about World War I, you should base it on one of the many books or journal articles on the subject, not on digging up some old New York Times article. That's precisely because it's actually not always the case that whatever the NYT happened to write at the time is either accurate or a complete picture. It's better to cite a proper historical study that's done a critical analysis of the original sources instead. But for very recent things where nobody has written anything better, newspapers are treated as an acceptable source. Ideally, they will be replaced with something else, at some later date: the Syrian War article is currently mostly sourced from newspapers, but in 30 years it really should be written with citations to major books and articles on the subject, not cobbled together from newspaper articles. There are a few exceptions; for example, longer-form magazine biopics, and newspaper obituaries, sometimes provide good longer-term sources for middle-level-fame figures who aren't well-known enough for anyone to have written books or journal articles about them.