You've got to take what you see, read and hear with a grain of salt no matter if it is in print, radio or TV.
Journalists of all ilk are trained in how to get the story and how to best present the story. Yes, they get the facts . . . but usually they do not take the time (due to training or simply due to the fact that they also are writing/covering several other major stories that day as well) to dig deeper into the story.
In my opinion journalists are paid to know a little about a lot . . . for example I don't know the first thing about the various nuances of the court system, but I can tell you in detail just about anything related to firefighting whereas a journalist needs to know a little bit about the court system and the terminology (i.e. indictment vs. conviction, grand jury, etc.), a little bit about firefighting and its terms (i.e. turnout gear, three alarm, fully involved, etc.) and a little bit about a bazillion other topics ranging from politics to some lady who thinks she has seen Elvis' likeness in a shriveled up potato she found in her refrigerator. As Cearbhaill mentioned when you are familiar with a topic, any story can typically be picked apart for problems, slight inaccuracies, etc. (i.e. don't even get me started on movies . . . like Backdraft
)
Quite honestly, if anyone of us had been asked to write a story about burning wood I suspect the story we would write before hanging out here at hearth.com would be a much, much different story than the one we would write now. It only takes reading a few comments from newbies (and weren't we all one at one time) who come here with pre-conceived notions to realize that there are many other folks out there who haven't been able to or wanted to take the time to learn more about this topic (i.e. how many stories have we heard about from folks who have neighbors who think they are not heating with wood due to no woodsmoke coming from their chimney?) This hindsight comes from spending a lot of time here and learning all we can about this topic -- again a luxury that journalists working on a deadline and with other stories to complete probably do not have.
So why am I here "defending" the journalists? Well, I kind of, sort of used to be one. Went to college and graduated with a degree in Communications . . . while I only worked for a short time full-time in the field (worked for a trade publication . . . until I realized that the trade publication's interest in commercial fishing was something I had no experience or desire to learn anything about) . . . I did go on to be a stringer (part time freelancer) with a couple of local newspapers (and even had a bi-weekly humor column for a while.)
These days I tend to work with the local media whenever they are looking for a story on fire prevention, CO poisoning, etc. and I'm happy to say that instead of butchering my words or altering what I've said they in fact tend to make me appear a lot smarter than I actually am . . . namely by removing all of the "Uh, I dunno", "Ah . . . um . . . ah . . . um" and other dumb comments I might make.
