But you will almost always be right in assuming that the newsies are wrong whenever they report on military matters. This is especially true concerning American military forces.
One really interesting thing (which I may try to write an article on sometime) is how hilariously wrong war reports even from respected newspapers were in WWII...sort of has been lost to history, but the newspapers are still there.
In the week after Midway, the "story" was how Army Air Corps B-17s had single-handedly wiped out the Japanese carrier fleet. A lot of BS about B-17s in the war... (aided greatly by the USAAF Heavy Bomber PR and propaganda machine)...a B-17 pilot previously had won a posthumous Medal of Honor for a "sinking" of a Japanese Battleship in the Phillipines that turned out to be a near-miss of a Japanese destroyer.
Those weren't the newsies' fault. Those claims were made by the bomber faction of the USAAF.
In the week after Midway, the "story" was how Army Air Corps B-17s had single-handedly wiped out the Japanese carrier fleet. A lot of BS about B-17s in the war... If you read "Victory Through Air Power", by A.P. de Seversky, which was written in the very early stages of the war, you will see a very Billy Mitchell prediction of how World War II should have been fought.
The author figured that all you needed were heavy bombers to bomb enemy capital ships as if the enemy ships would be the anchored and undefended German battleships that Mitchell sunk. He calculated how many bombers were need to sink the entire Japanese Fleet and came to the conclusion that the U.S. Navy could be replaced by long range bombers.
Now it is true that B-17's out of Midway sortied out to attack the Japanese fleet and that they claimed hits but historians now doubt that a single hit was ever scored.
As one B-17 crewman said about bombing the Japanese ships at high altitude, "It was like trying to drop a marble on a running mouse."
