Have you considered that maybe it's the government's fault that the media reported it in this way because - as in this example - the government intentionally obscured both how much the app cost and what was actually being supplied for the figure they stated.
To be quite honest, "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is more than newsworthy.
To your other point, we have in the past seen the media reporting these types of things in incomplete ways for fear of irritating their sources and losing reporting access.
> To be quite honest, "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is more than newsworthy.
If its true. In contemporary journalism the truth doesn't matter. Things can have perfectly reasonable explanations and be working as intended, and the only thing required to turn them into scandal is to omit those explanations and add a clickbait headline instead.
There's plenty of examples for that in Europe in the way journalists paint perfectly reasonable EU directives as utter nonsense handed down by stupid bureaucrats.
Things can also have perfectly reasonable explanations and be working as intended and still be an example of waste and scandalous. Just because you can see how it happened and why it happened doesn't mean you have to agree that the why and how are necessarily good reasons.
"Perfectly reasonable explanations / working as intended" and "example of waste and scandalous" are mutually exclusive IMO. You're right in principle, but what I see in practice is something completely different. Reasonable situations can be - and are - painted as ridiculous with proper application of journalistic freedom. It'd be better if people were thinking more critically about what they read, but outrage seems to be a pretty good mindhack the media learned to exploit. So I believe it is their moral responsibility not to abuse the gullibility of the readers.
It's also likely that government accounting departments only report costs at the project level and not at the line-item level -- it is common practice to just report on CapEx vs. OpEx because there are so many variations as to how things can be bought and sold, especially on technology projects (no idea if CapEx and OpEx make sense in the context of government work since they're primarily for tax purposes, but you know what I mean).
I doubt any company in America can tell you exactly what an app cost them to build. They can tell you what the product cost to develop, but the app itself is kind of beside the point: you don't get an app without the up-front work of determining the requirements, so why bother to separate the costs? Some projects have complex requirements and simple implementations, others have simple requirements and very complex implementations. The project cost is what everyone is concerned with anyway; and while the project manager should have the line-item information for the project, it's often not rolled up higher than that because the reconciliation would be nearly impossible.
