They Just Don't Care
And as far as I know, no other news outlet in the world got this point wrong except the BBC -- not even the tabloids.
People often accuse the BBC of agenda-driven falsification of stories. Perhaps that's sometimes true, I don't know. But in the cases of science mis-reporting that I'm familiar with -- and there are many of them -- the problem seems to be that the reporters and editors concerned are arrogant, lazy, and not very smart.
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Perhaps the BBC News stories in question are turned out by low-level employees who are given only a few minutes to re-write each press release, and are strictly prohibited from doing any independent research, even as much as might be accomplished in a half an hour of web research, or a brief interview with an expert. If so, then all the blame belongs to the managers who have thus condemned their writers to produce drivel. --Mark Liberman --They Just Don't Care (Language Log)
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