It could be they tried to be correct and did the best they could on a meager time budget. Doubly so for TV news
I have a hard time ascribing too much to effort. For the one wrong fact, there could be many things that were checked and were true. But of course the wrong thing stands out
That said, I feel like journalists know how to Google for basic company info...
It was clear they just assumed things and didn't do any checking. Part of that was probably the pressure to hurry up and get it in the can, the rest was it was just a job to them and they simply didn't care. They got the video of the hole in the building, and that was good enough.
Unfortunately, if the Bloomberg reporter used Google, it didn't help the reporter any. Here's a screenshot of Altman's bio from a search I just ran, which lists him as president of Y Combinator, which he is not:
Yes, that info is drawn from Wikipedia, but Google really doesn't do a good job of highlighting the source of its Knowledge Graph boxed results. Any tech-savvy reporter (I hope) would hesitate to automatically trust Wikipedia results, but Google's bio boxes are so authoritative looking by their placement that I can see (but not endorse) reporters just going with it.
I have a hard time ascribing too much to effort. For the one wrong fact, there could be many things that were checked and were true. But of course the wrong thing stands out
That said, I feel like journalists know how to Google for basic company info...