For a good example of how reporters can be mislead, or can mislead themselves by buying too heavily into a narrative, and not examining alternatives with enough scrutiny, read about the Killian Documents Controversy (about George W Bush's military service, reported by Dan Rather 60 Minutes); or read about "A Rape On Campus" (the Rolling Stone article that was retracted in its entirety):
In both cases, it seemed to me that the reporters involved crafted a story in their heads about what happened, and then only sought information that confirmed their story while ignoring information that contradicted it. The Duke Lacrosse case is an example of the same thing happening in a criminal prosecution:
Another theme that I've seen is experts giving an interview about some very specific/narrow topic, which is then spun, taken out of context, or generally misquoted by reporters and presented as something different. This happened with document verification in the Killian controversy, and also seems to have happened with this Bloomberg story, according to another comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18278023 . In the Killian case, document examiners explicitly told CBS that they were relying on poor material that could not be authenticated (see Wikipedia section "Response of the document examiners"), but CBS went ahead and characterized the documents as having been authenticated by experts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
In both cases, it seemed to me that the reporters involved crafted a story in their heads about what happened, and then only sought information that confirmed their story while ignoring information that contradicted it. The Duke Lacrosse case is an example of the same thing happening in a criminal prosecution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
Another theme that I've seen is experts giving an interview about some very specific/narrow topic, which is then spun, taken out of context, or generally misquoted by reporters and presented as something different. This happened with document verification in the Killian controversy, and also seems to have happened with this Bloomberg story, according to another comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18278023 . In the Killian case, document examiners explicitly told CBS that they were relying on poor material that could not be authenticated (see Wikipedia section "Response of the document examiners"), but CBS went ahead and characterized the documents as having been authenticated by experts.