It's not that journalists are often wrong, it's that journalists often say stuff that is obviously wrong to anyone who knows anything about the subject. And that indicates sloppy investigation, like not contacting Signal before reporting this story.
The question is are they more wrong than any other segment of the population that writes for consumption?
Journalists, unlike say bloggers or marketers or think tank authors or pundits, have a fairly robust ethics/rules system about how to publish. Does it fail them at times? Of course, but do they fail at a higher % than other outlets?
I’ve never seen any actual evidence to suggest that. That there is a pithy quote from a Nobel prize winner isn’t interesting.
The point is that journalists tend to be a lot less reliable than the reading public seems to think they are.
Most people would have enough sense to take information with a grain of salt if the source is "I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy." Even if the guy is reliable, who is to say that the other guy is reliable?
Journalists aren't random people who have "heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy". They do reporting: they call people, develop sources, and work with fact checkers. That doesn't make them right all the time, or mean you should read them uncritically. But, of course, the bullshit meme is that you shouldn't take them seriously at all. It's premised on holding journalists to a standard we don't hold doctors to, let alone software developers.
