Why are journos so dishonest?
No. The whole complex is to blame here, the scientists didn't do some rigorous open ended work. All of the scientists of course already believed that foreign aid is effective and beneficial (it is generally neither, especially not in the way it is actually practiced, where you dump random things into some poor place of the world and then leave) and are now gathering evidence to support that position so that articles like this can be written.
It is of course somewhat hilarious to claim 300k deaths without being able to point to a single actual death. All of this pseudo debate exists to mask the actual question under contention. Given the enormous amounts of resources the west has poured into the poorest places on earth, when do we see the positive results? The only measurable result is that over time only more and more is needed, which of course simultaneously undermines the premise of foreign aid and paradoxically makes it more important.
The impact of aid programs is well studied. Here is one of hundreds or thousands of studies showing a measurable positive impact in terms of lives saved: https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/assessi...
The supply of foreign aid is usually not determined by need but by willingness of the donor countries. So when foreign aid makes progress against one disease or crisis, the money is redirected to the next most pressing issue. This doesn't mean it is useless or is not solving problems.
It is true as a philosophical point that sometimes, an attempt to solve a problem backfires and even worsens the problem. But it is also true that an attempt to solve a problem sometimes solves the problem. You've offered no evidence that foreign aid is ineffective or backfires in any way, just a handwaving story, against the hard quantitative evidence I linked in my comment above.
If they did not know each other from college or growing up, the NGO associated people seek out journalists for that kind of reason and journalists are often flattered by the attention, aka lobbying, and drawn in. It’s a really corrupted system that only further encourages that kind of behavior because it is the very nature of that system today that any new entrants come into.
Basically none of the transparency efforts of the mid aughts seem to have really made any kind of real impact on the corruption of the system either. I’m not sure if it’s just correlation, but it almost feels like the transparency efforts only gave false senses of confidence, not to mention that many of the transparency initiatives are also corrupted, receiving their funding also from the NGO complex and also being drawn into the complex itself. It’s an inherently incestuous system like the MIC or the judicial system.