Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense.
While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible.
Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.
Still not buying it. I don't feel like journalists are trained to tease out facts, they still tease out stories.
For pretty much any newsworthy event there are lots of facts that are concrete and objective, and frankly, that's what matters most of the time. Life decisions and motivations and biases make for a fun reading, but are otherwise irrelevant.
A politician said something, or did not. A company is going forward with a project, or is not. The proposed law implies a consequence X, or does not. Those are ground facts. I'm not saying they're always easy to establish, but the media sources are not even trying.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting site that tries to run Bayesian analysis on various pieces of information and media reports, to piece out the actual reality. See e.g.: https://www.rootclaim.com/claims/what-caused-the-chemical-ca... What I want to point out there is not their analysis in particular. Just how it's structured. It seems that establishing some objectively verifiable summary of a "messy" real-world story is not impossible.
While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible.
Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.