Nice reading. What you described can be seamlessly applied to every other field in journalism, from sports to politics, at least where I'm from (Italy). And that's quite alarming. I think that in this day and age, what with Social Networks and all, everybody's opinion is worth a cent, and the distinction between fact and opinion is becoming progressively slimmer. Journalism is no longer creating trends and informing people, but it has to follow trends and give the people what they want to read, what's "hot" at the moment. They need the clicks.
It doesn't help that, to the average reader, tech is not very different from magic, so it's easier to pretend to know everything about it. I mean, how many times we've heard someone described as "great with computers" just because they know how to format a document in Word?