When the media reports on something you know a lot about

You are 100% correct. I find they generally seem to run about 60% accuracy

I occasionally see things in local media and industry publications that I know, without a doubt, are factually incorrect. Usually pretty minor details though, to be fair

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When the media reports on something you know a lot about

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I love nature docs and used to take them as 100% truth until I saw an animal planet doc about fire ants. They made it seem like fire ants were coming into houses and eating babies alive. Since then I take nature docs that do anything other than explain behavior that is being filmed with a grain of salt.

I have intimate knowledge of two current industries and the media completely botches every story/report. Most of it is intentional.

The public also has very little knowledge of these industries so they just swallow it down and it gives the industries a bad reputation

I have literally rewritten articles from scratch for media members because they were so far factually off base, only to have them and their editors F it up all over again prior to publishing. I go look at source data as often as possible for any media story I have an interest in. Trust no one in media. They count on you to be three things:

1. Bad at math.
2. Easily influenced by their spin and word connotation, not to mention you won't read the last couple of paragraphs, which is where some of them are still forced to quote the facts.
3. To busy or lazy to check source documents or speeches.

There's a famous, quote about newspapers by Micheal Crichton.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

I will say that when youre required to pump out so much stuff and with as bare bones as many media outlets are running right now facts are unfortunately probably forced to take a back seat. It sucks because that should be all that matters.

Yep, literally anything accounting related. I laugh when they try to talk about anything close to valuing businesses, it's all educated guesses unless an arms length transaction occurs, and even then is it every truly arms length when businesses work with each other all the time.

Just like Erwin Knoll's law of media accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."