How true is the news?

Media everywhere ran the story about Harvard rejecting 119 aplicants because they tried to learn their admissions status early by “hacking into a Web site“, but the initial stories gave no details of the “hack”. Now we learn that it consisted of modifying a URL. Sheesh! It’s not exactly rocket science.

Now here’s my point: how come the original news stories didn’t report this? The average reporter has to have a good understanding of the net by now. It looks as if the first facts in got thrown to the world without doing any work on the other side of the story, and I suspect this is the norm, so most news stories should be taken as significantly incomplete.