[cscurmudgeon]

Now, if a press release from a top univ is so wrong on something that is easily checkable, how accurate are other forms of news?

[nerdponx]

Think of "press release wrongness" with a probability distribution. Some press releases are really good, some are really bad. A sensible prior would be somewhere in the middle. If you start to see a lot of bad press releases, then you can update your posterior towards "I can't trust any of these."

[bee_rider]

Is that a good prior? I expect due to Dunning–Kruger that the willingness to produce an article on a topic would follow a pretty intense bimodal distribution.