Woodward - Bernstein, Where Did You Go?

This morning, when I rolled out of bed - or rather, over to the keyboard, I found an article on MSNBC that caught my eye - Space Station Science Get's Squeezed. At the time, it was just a little article tucked under the science section that no one was really intended to notice but as, what is apparently a slow news day, trickled on, somehow, this travesty managed to get top billing with a great big pretty picture highlighting it at the top of the page.

The thing about it that caught my eye is - hi, i'm sleeping with a NASA geek but, even me, the relatively disconcerned, was wrapped up in it within a few sentences when I read the phrase "$100 billion white elephant" and almost fell out of my desk chair because - yeah, this is so not in the OP-ED section where it belongs.

What happened to fact checking? What happened to fully understanding a situation before you started spouting your mouth off? I know integrity isn't something you can expect from an individual on the street, your next-door neighbor or, in my case, your mother but christ - since when did it become truly acceptable for journalists not to care what kind of tripe their putting into the minds of the American public.

I know that people can't be jack-of-all-trades and that when you're reporting on a subject you're often given a short amount of time to educate yourself on something that is generally far to massive a subject matter for you to fully understand in the span of a few days, but when that happens, isn't it the resposibility of the journalist in question and of their editors and the owner of the paper to step in and tone down the condescending, malformed opinions a smidge?