[jelpern]

It's very hard for media - even specialist media - to be as well versed in the technical knowledge of the practitioner. You see it all the time in financial journalism as well where people through around large numbers that are grossly distorted from reality. If the journalists were as good at the technical aspects of what they covered as the practitioners, they would be making a lot more money as practitioners (see for example Michael Arrington, or Michael Moritz before him). Celebrity journalists such as Michael Lewis or Tom Wolfe might be excepted from this rule, although even Andrew Ross Sorkin makes a lot of financial errors in his writing. Dan Primack is one of the few financial journalists who puts so much energy into understanding what he covers to get it right, yet loves the beat so much that he doesn't seem to be interested in becoming a money manager any time soon. I've digressed a bit towards financial journalism, but tech journalism and other journalistic areas in which technical knowledge is required suffer from similar problems.

[TeMPOraL]

Either they can do it or they shouldn't do it at all. It makes little sense to read an article that you know from the beginning is wrong because the journalist couldn't understand what he's writing about. Bad information is worse than no information.

[gojomo]

That's an unrealistic standard: journalists are very rarely experts in what they report, but their flawed accounts can still be useful. The reader just has to be aware and avoid overconfidence in the particular details, when those are filtered through flawed, erroneous, and oversimplified sources.

You can still extract some signal from a noisy or biased channel: bad information is better than no information, if you have some inkling of how it's bad.