Devil's in the details, I guess. It's really hard to be a subject matter expert at everything, yet we find journalists are often required to write pieces about topics in fields they've never worked.
The Paul Krugman model (PhD, nobel prize winner, professor at MIT/Princeton, writing for the NYT) is quite rare. And even then, he doesn't exclusively write about his field of expertise.
You mentioned reporting though... reporting facts is actually the one thing that journalists do often get right, and that's largely viewed as something holy. Analysis of journalism often finds that western journalists are incredibly accurate in their reporting, but they (un)wilfully frame stories, omit (sometimes by ignorance) important details or focus on meaningless anecdotes.
For example, there was a time when in my region the local news kept reporting that 'real estate boom: 60% of homes are being sold for or above the asking price'. All news agencies took it over, a rare few even omitting 'for or' and just reported '60% above asking price'. If you looked carefully, they cited data from a RE agent association that had an interest in making it seem as if you could make an easy buck by buying a home before it rose even more. The association's media reports focused on the 60% figure, but didn't mention the flipside of the underlying data: about 40% of homes were sold below the asking price and 40% were sold for approximately the asking price. In other words, news agencies could have also reported the exact same data by stating '80% of homes were sold for or below the asking price'.
I'd been reading these news reports (among others) for a year before I decided to buy a home and had a certain impression of the RE market going into it (a sellers market, had to bid aggressively and wave various rights to recourse to convince a seller). Not until I dove into the data did I find the reporting mischaracterised the market, despite citing factual data. The reason I think in this case and others, is that the journalists aren't RE agents, they're mostly just 29 year-olds with a journalism degree reporting on the 8 different industries they were assigned to, from RE to dairy to, relying heavily on industry associations' brief media reports and representatives to shape a narrative.
The Paul Krugman model (PhD, nobel prize winner, professor at MIT/Princeton, writing for the NYT) is quite rare. And even then, he doesn't exclusively write about his field of expertise.
You mentioned reporting though... reporting facts is actually the one thing that journalists do often get right, and that's largely viewed as something holy. Analysis of journalism often finds that western journalists are incredibly accurate in their reporting, but they (un)wilfully frame stories, omit (sometimes by ignorance) important details or focus on meaningless anecdotes.
For example, there was a time when in my region the local news kept reporting that 'real estate boom: 60% of homes are being sold for or above the asking price'. All news agencies took it over, a rare few even omitting 'for or' and just reported '60% above asking price'. If you looked carefully, they cited data from a RE agent association that had an interest in making it seem as if you could make an easy buck by buying a home before it rose even more. The association's media reports focused on the 60% figure, but didn't mention the flipside of the underlying data: about 40% of homes were sold below the asking price and 40% were sold for approximately the asking price. In other words, news agencies could have also reported the exact same data by stating '80% of homes were sold for or below the asking price'.
I'd been reading these news reports (among others) for a year before I decided to buy a home and had a certain impression of the RE market going into it (a sellers market, had to bid aggressively and wave various rights to recourse to convince a seller). Not until I dove into the data did I find the reporting mischaracterised the market, despite citing factual data. The reason I think in this case and others, is that the journalists aren't RE agents, they're mostly just 29 year-olds with a journalism degree reporting on the 8 different industries they were assigned to, from RE to dairy to, relying heavily on industry associations' brief media reports and representatives to shape a narrative.