[the various inaccuracies such as "They cite radiocarbon dating to show that Earth is billions of years old, not a few thousand years old...]
Anyone with a background in physics (or any other science) can read ANY science or technology story disseminated by the standard media outlets and just laugh and laugh and laugh at the gross misunderstandings journalists have about the subject.
Even the "science correspondents" are horribly incompetent at reporting science.
David Suzuki is living proof of that assertion ;-)
Yep....don't even have to be in the field, once you really begin to understand a field even as a layman, the repeated errors in science reporting are just as obvious.
Anyway, I noticed that people noticed the egregious NYT blunder regarding "radiocarbon" dating, but never actually said what it was.
For the benefit of those who may not know, it's actually a common Creationist belief that ALL dating of old objects is "radiocarbon" dating; actually it's only used for very recent, biological items....I believe it goes back only 50,000 years....will have to look that up.
When rocks billions of years old are dated a variety of other techniques are used such as argon-argon, etc.