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.
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.