[warmblood]

To be quite honest, "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is more than newsworthy.

To your other point, we have in the past seen the media reporting these types of things in incomplete ways for fear of irritating their sources and losing reporting access.

[TeMPOraL]

> To be quite honest, "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is more than newsworthy.

If its true. In contemporary journalism the truth doesn't matter. Things can have perfectly reasonable explanations and be working as intended, and the only thing required to turn them into scandal is to omit those explanations and add a clickbait headline instead.

There's plenty of examples for that in Europe in the way journalists paint perfectly reasonable EU directives as utter nonsense handed down by stupid bureaucrats.

[zaphar]

Things can also have perfectly reasonable explanations and be working as intended and still be an example of waste and scandalous. Just because you can see how it happened and why it happened doesn't mean you have to agree that the why and how are necessarily good reasons.

[TeMPOraL]

"Perfectly reasonable explanations / working as intended" and "example of waste and scandalous" are mutually exclusive IMO. You're right in principle, but what I see in practice is something completely different. Reasonable situations can be - and are - painted as ridiculous with proper application of journalistic freedom. It'd be better if people were thinking more critically about what they read, but outrage seems to be a pretty good mindhack the media learned to exploit. So I believe it is their moral responsibility not to abuse the gullibility of the readers.