There’s another way the press usually gets it wrong. Passwords aren’t encrypted, they’re hashed.
Generally true. But strictly speaking, it depends on whether the cleartext password can be obtained from the other. If so, it was encrypted. If not, it was hashed. Hashing is forward-only, and often adds or discards selected information, while true encryption maintains all original information intact and therefore can be reversed (decrypted).
There's generally no good reason to encrypt passwords; hashing is sufficient since the auth test is usually just a match of the hashed forms.
But hey, Unix crypt(3) is really just a hash, using the supplied password as a 56-bit key to the DES Data Encryption Standard working on a block of all-zeroes. So the naming confusion has a long-standing basis... :)