> ...it rankles me when the news press 
>  makes egregious errors.

"The press" is not what it used to be many years ago - reporters are now painfully young, and mostly interns, some not even yet finished college. 
Columnists who write opinion, and "news anchors" aside, actual reporting is overwhelmingly done by amazingly naive kids.
More than one beekeeper took advantage of this wide-eyed lack of skepticism, either for fun, or for self-aggrandizement.

The appeal of a story about the first "endangered species" that one could literally mail-order and help "save" in one's own backyard with one's own two hands was simply too compelling a story to be tempered with boring factual details.  (The sole exception here was the 1970s, when we saved the whales, but at that time I only had the one guest bathroom with the one bathtub, so I could only save the one whale...)

In the 2007-2011 period, when people were shoving cameras and microphones in the face of every beekeeper, I allowed Margot Adler of NPR news (a very well-respected reporter, who lived on Riverside Drive, on the far west side of Manhattan) to attend a few of the free beekeeping classes I taught from 2005-2015.  She put her accurate and adequately tongue-in-cheek report on the air, but politely waited to air that report for several months, until after the ban on beekeeping had been officially lifted by the "New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene" (the most appropriate name by far for an agency regulating beekeeping).

Margot was a bright and shining exception, as she was an experienced reporter. Most reporters could not even accurately copy from a printed fact sheet.  I know, we printed them up so everyone could hand them to any reporter who accosted them, and they still printed nonsense.  

I still tell people that I don’t keep bees to save the bees, and I don't keep bees to save the planet.  I keep bees the save humanity from what I might be if I didn't keep bees.

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