[mistrial9]

this captures a meta-observation very well.. a "PhD" worth of knowledge is needed to discern, but publishing a stock photo for a news item is incentivized to be a moment's decision. Compare and contrast to "any idiot can ask hard questions that take days to reply correctly to" .. there is a power asymmetry at work in the public eye. Guideropes and economic assumptions disappearing into a sand-storm of digital information.

basically, not looking good for the future of reliable media

[seadan83]

I think a PhD study would be needed to know accuracy rates of media over time across many outlets before such a generalization can be made that "media accuracy has gotten worse".

How does one even measure accuracy? Number of corrections might indicate it, but who is to say that all of media is forthcoming with corrections. How does one control for digital vs non-digital distributions? Is the rate of accuracy different per medium, and how would that roll-up for the overall organization?

I think the meta-observation still holds. The response to "media organizations are all inaccurate and this has gotten worse!" - is asymmetric compared to the effort to make the statement. Happily hacker news has a culture where statements are assumed to be opinions (unless otherwise presented with a citation or somethign), and opinions are generally not held to be worth much in this discourse.