Details, Details

There are lots of "laws" named after people that speak to random bits and pieces of people's lived experiences. One of them is "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy" which is as follows:

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Erwin Knoll (1931 - 1994)

When I first encountered this, I felt that it was amusing enough to take down, but I really didn't think much of it. Until I came across that rare story of which I did happen to have some firsthand knowledge. It wasn't that I considered the story untrue, but I found that the details weren't quite right. There were a couple of things that were said that weren't quite accurate. And it has turned out the same for every subsequent story that I've read in the meantime.

The most recent example was a piece on the recently released computer game Cyberpunk 2077. There was a story on the NPR webpage excoriating it for not being true to the spirit of the original tabletop game. The author of the story sets out to prove his bone fides vis-a-vis the tabletop games.

Fact: I played Cyberpunk back in the early 90's when it was just a tabletop RPG inspired by Blade Runner and William Gibson's sprawl stories. It was a product of its time, existing in a universe with space stations and cyberarms, but without cellphones.
Jason Sheehan "In 'Cyberpunk 2077,' The Only Truly Punk Move Is Not To Play"

Here is what the game itself has to say.

Cellular Phones
The phone of the future is mobile and cordless, allowing the cyberpunk on the go to talk from his car, office, or even on the street. These "cellular" phones operate by using a series of stationary transceivers which pick up your phone signal and relay it to the regular phone Net.
Cyberpunk. Welcome to Night City: A Sourcebook for 2013. p.5

Now, I know this because I too played Cyberpunk back in the early 1990s. (Yep. I'm still uncool.) And I still have my copy of the game, from which I transcribed the above. And remember the cellular phones because one of the peculiarities of the setting was that there was no understanding that phones would become smaller and more powerful. In the Cyberpunk universe, a computer powerful enough to run a sophisticated VR setup and allow hackers to brute-force their way into heavily-defended corporate networks (and the batteries to run it for hours on end) was small enough to be carried in one hand (think the size of an old Sega Genesis or original Playstation console), but cellular phone handsets didn't shrink a bit. And so it stuck with me. The second I read Mr. Sheehan's remark, I knew it was incorrect, and I knew where to look to prove it.

In the end, it's not a big thing. Mr. Sheehan misremembered a detail from a game that was released some 32 years ago (or, like a lot of people today, conflates "cellphones" with "smartphones") and whoever edited the opinion piece for NPR probably didn't know any better and let it go by. It's a minor point, and one that doesn't really take away from the overall point that he's making. (What does detract from the point he's making is that Mike Pondsmith, who wrote the Cyberpunk tabletop games series, feels that CD Projekt RED "nailed it.")

But it illustrates a problem with "the media" as an institution. To convey the facts to others, one must first know the facts oneself. The media doesn't need to be corrupt or biased to be, from time to time, simply incorrect. And if they're just as fallible as the rest of humanity, they're not always going to know what they don't know, just like anyone else. And that makes them less reliable than they like to think of themselves.