I'm sure that everyone who is in some branch of science has had a few frustrating brushes with the media. Scientific issues are often covered in an extremly poor fashion and I believe that there are a number of reasons for this.
Reporters assigned to cover scientific topics are often notoriously scientifically illiterate. However, this is not all that bad -what is worse is that they take distinct pride in knowing nothing about science. Thus the attitude of the reporter when he reports a scientific matter is this :Look I'm a normal person- you bunch of crazy guys have done something which I understand may be important. The people I'm writing for are normal people and they also agree that you are crazy. Now give me a few crisp interesting statements which I may use for my story.
An example of this sort of thing occured when Lijun Wang and his associates at NEC Research Institute conducted this negative group velocity of light experiment. What they actually demonstrated was anamolous dispersion resulting in a group velocity of -c/310, the headlines in the newspapers the next day said "300 times faster than light!. The reporter went on to mention how these people had submitted their paper to Nature(that divine journal so out of the reach of normal people) , and signed off with a few crisp quotes from various physicists(who had no idea what the experiment actually was) like "this revolutionary experiment will have an important bearing on the future of science". The worst part is that the correct news never appeared in newspapers even after the paper was published. Maybe this was because an article which talked about group velocity would be hardly as sensational (who cares about truth, sensation is what is important).
There is a vicious cycle involved here for when the reporter reports a scientist's statement as though it had divine sanctity, it promotes this wrong view of science among people. The next set of reporters come from these very people and thus grow up with this view which they cannot shed.
I believe this is a very serious problem which has not really got the attention it deserves. Science is an important part of our culture today, and it is inexcusable to take pride in scientific illiteracy.