As a followup: At some point while I was trying to keep my annoyance in check at being forced to listen to CNN in the airport terminal during a layover on my trip back from PAX East in Boston I had a realization about traditional media. It's essentially just a giant example of the broken telephone game. The information from the people who actually know and understand what's going on is transferred in relay-like fashion through spokespeople, to reporters, to copy writers, to editors, to anchors. Sadly most of the people involved in this chain do not have any expertise in the subjects at hand and do not have robust mechanisms for ensuring the accuracy or utility of their reporting.

In the end you get the classic "purple monkey dishwasher" problem of too many questionably reliable nodes on an information route, and then amplified by the prejudices and predilections of everyone involved plus the needs of the news organization to drive traffic in order to maximize revenue.