I don’t know what the root cause is.  As the popular adage goes, “Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.”  In this case, I suspect we could replace “malice” with “ignorance” and “stupidity” with “laziness”.

In any case, the quality of news reporting is not only falling with respect to content (as noted on a previous occasion) but also with basic linquistic accuracy.  Here is the latest choice passage from today’s feed on Stuff.

A helicopter with thermal imaging equipment flew over the mountains this morning showed no areas of concern.