It doesn't really matter whether the subject is politics, technology, science, sports - the bottom line is that journalism has just as many lazy placeholders pushing paper as any other field. Put another way, Dilbert isn't just suffering in the technology field - his - and more importantly, Wally and the boss - are alive and well everywhere. Here's an example, which I found at InstaPundit - here he's quoting from "The Appearance of Impropriety"

Most reporters aren't scoop-hungry investigators. They're wage earners who want to please their editors with as little effort as possible, and they're happy to let you provide them with ideas and facts for publishable stories. That is why most publicity is positive for people and their businesses.

...

An experiment by a group of journalism students at the University of Tennessee demonstrates just how willing reporters can be to accept facts and story ideas that involve little work. The students concocted a fictitious press release from a group opposing "political correctness" and mailed it to a number of newspapers. Most did not run it, but quite a few did -- and none checked the details one way or another. One newspaper even embellished the story with additional details that were not included in the original press release. When word of the experiment got out, journalists were predictably outraged, with one even saying that it violated the bond of trust (!) between journalists and public-relations professionals. A more likely explanation for the outrage is that the experiment uncovered a pattern of shoddy work that its practitioners would have preferred to keep unexposed. Not plagiarism, perhaps, but something that in many ways is worse.

That puts a whole new spin on the way analysts work in the technology sector too - how many of the reports we see weren't just funded by one (or more) companies, but actually written by them as well? Analysts are no better or worse than anyone else, so I'd guess that the answer is a disturbingly high number.

This also explains the herd mentality of things in the IT industry. Industry analysts and journalists get hopped up - all at the same time - about some great new thing that appears on the scene (Java, WS*). A perfect storm of articles appears touting the new stuff, and why everyone should use it. Enter the average IT manager, who again - is no better or worse than anyone else, and who tries to keep up by reading a few magazines. Wow, he thinks - "everyone" is talking about technology X. The development staff suddenly gets blind-sided by a set of inexplicable requirements.

This behavior isn't terribly different than general media reporting - combine a small set of manufactured news with instant polling (the methodology hidden in small print at the back of some PDF), and you get a news story from nothing at all.

The only defense against this is to read as many sources as you possibly can, and see if you can possibly find the real nub of the matter (any matter) from across the spectrum of sources you look at. Sadly, that nub is non-existant an awful lot of the time. Reporting that "our current systems work just fine" is every bit as boring as "Not a lot of importance happened today".