"the subject was outside of the journalists' experience, the story was a maze, hard for an outsider to follow. I keep that in mind when I watch such programs now. "

Yep! Sadly 'journalists' now have dedicated University courses that deal with only 'journalism'. Older 'hacks' were experienced in 'Life' - including fields like Law, Engineering, Medicine, Science, often with degrees gained before they "found their life's calling", or stumbled into a journalism career, so they actually HAD the hooks to deal with complicated subjects.

One of the funniest stories "Media Watch" ever did was the one about the University of Southern Queensland - USQ, pronounced U-Suck! (wait for the punchline!) :-) which was an 'upgraded institute of technology'!!! (Oz now has 2 types of Unis - 'Unis for the real world' and 'real universities'!!!)

Someone had taken a set of Word documents which detailed the whole Department philosophy, (wait for the punchline!) and courses, etc. and ran them thru a 'web page converter program'.

Now you may not realise that Word documents, unless specially saved in a particular way, normally contain all the 'old crap' such as chunks of text that have been cut and pasted, reedited, etc... so you can imagine the sort of nonsense gibberish that the USQ Dept of Journalism was proudly displaying to the world!

As the program's producer said - now we know where they make all those journalists that we complain about every week!!!

As I said, Media Watch is not watched normally by those don't already know what is going on, so it is used a as source by those who can usually detect any nonsense that MW itself puts out - and they get criticised all the time...