"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents are up 12% since last year when city council rejected the proposed budget increase for more snowplows and ice control to meet the city's growing transportation needs."

"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the city's informal do-not-prosecute list."

In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously true, and the data given does not support one cause over the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present, the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus points, read these examples again, imagining that overall driving increased by about 12% due to people working from home less.)

For this to work properly, the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements. But reality has become far too complex for that, plus these articles are being written under severe time constraints. Ultimately, what will happen is the journalist using their personal or the editorial biases of the publication to create a narrative consistent with their world view. Whether or not that narrative has any basis in reality is not really their concern.

The question when becomes whether there is any value in publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there is actually negative value in the former, because the audience ends up less informed than if they had never consumed that piece of media.

Hmm, I like the thrust of your point, here, and I do think that when people think critically about the news, they aren't "stupid and credulous".

But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.

I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"