You do see a lot of really poor understanding of statistics out there, but on reflection, I want to say the latter is much worse. If journalists with an agenda were actually good at manipulating data, it would be much harder to put trust in anything.
I totally understand that, statistics really is a double edged sword. I think a good journalist can do a lot of wonderful things with data. If we end up living in a world where journalists are banned from using data at all, that would be very disappointing.