Either they can do it or they shouldn't do it at all. It makes little sense to read an article that you know from the beginning is wrong because the journalist couldn't understand what he's writing about. Bad information is worse than no information.
That's an unrealistic standard: journalists are very rarely experts in what they report, but their flawed accounts can still be useful. The reader just has to be aware and avoid overconfidence in the particular details, when those are filtered through flawed, erroneous, and oversimplified sources.
You can still extract some signal from a noisy or biased channel: bad information is better than no information, if you have some inkling of how it's bad.
