It seems to me in the past 10 or so years the apparent scientific and mathematical literacy of journalism majors (which has never been held in high regard) has absolutely nosedived. It’s difficult to find a piece without at least one embarrassing fundamental error.
Just a couple days ago I saw a followup on the Titan submersible implosion that was very well polished, and clearly had a wide variety of sources, and was good about citations. Yet it also listed pressures that were off by orders of magnitude, and claimed that the ~500m depth mark was important because that’s when the pressure begins to press against all sides of a sub, and not just downward from on top. I had to read that part more than once just to make sure the author really was claiming that hydrostatic pressure somehow works fundamentally differently at different depths. The author also clearly did not understand the concept of fatigue in a material in the slightest, but was more than happy to lecture the reader about it. I suppose that’s one of the things that really rubs me the wrong way about the state of modern journalism- even if they’re not trying to cram their politics down your throat, they still regard themselves as smarter and more broadly qualified than their audience, and in my opinion that’s never been less true.
I guess we know what courses had to be cut to make way for the woke indoctrination ones.
Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I came to the realization that on any topic of which I had personal or professional expertise, Big Media got things catastrophically wrong on a regular basis. I then came to distrust them on ANY topic: If they're horribly wrong on things that I know about, they're certain to also be horribly wrong on things that I DON'T know about. The problem seems to get worse every year.