I was just reading this article about inaccuracies in a CNet article on the cluster of Apple G5 computers at Virginia Tech, and thinking about my own experience with the media. Lately I’ve been thinking more and more that the media is fundamentally unreliable. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to read stories in the media about things I know about first hand, usually in the business section. These stories have always contained glaring and fundamental inaccuracies. Further, my experience with feature stories is that the reporter nearly always has a story that they want to tell, and they massage the quotations included to tell that story, rather than constructing a story from the information that they’re given. The overall effect this has had has been to make me less interested in the specific details of just about any story I read, because I believe there’s a good chance they’re simply wrong.