If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you'll notice that they always get major things wrong -- basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening -- things even a novice in the space would know better about.

It makes perfect sense, if you think about it, that reporting is so reliably unreliable. Why do we expect reporters to learn about a suddenly newsworthy situation, gather information about it under deadline, then confidently explain the subject to the rest of the nation after having known about it for all of a week? People form their entire worldviews out of this stuff.