Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
George Orwell
Great Orwell quote—fits with my real world experience as well.
I am retired now—but I was a “subject matter expert” in a field that received a moderate amount of mass media coverage.
The articles got lots of facts wrong—quoted numbers and studies without understanding the assumptions behind them—and generally reached conclusions somewhere in the range of uninformed to stupid to ridiculous.
The root of the flaw in the modern journalistic enterprise is their sources—usually these are public relations flacks for large institutions with axes to grind. Even if those PR flacks knew factual information (which they usually do not) they would only presented data that supported the viewpoint they were paid to present.