What motivates a journalist?

OK, I have to unload a burden here.

I often interact with the tech press in various places throughout the world. I've had wonderful, productive meetings with many fine journalists. New Zealand and Malaysia particularly stand out in my memory. However, a thing has happened today that, while not affecting my relationships with individual journalists, irritates me about tech reporting in general.

Take a look at this: "Windows Wi-Fi patch could be a long time in coming." It describes a "vulnerability" recently reported by a researcher at a security conference. c|net also wrote about this two days ago.

I'm disappointed at the seemingly superficial reporting here. Mark Loveless (the researcher) has discovered a way to confuse unsuspecting people simply by taking advantage of a feature in Windows. He has not discovered a vulnerability. There's no error in either code or the default configuration here.

Today's article implies that a bad guy can get access to any system he wants to. Thing is, the default configuration won't permit that. You have to run as local admin and deliberately misconfigure your wireless settings for a bad guy to connect to your computer -- and when you do this, Windows warns you multiple times about potential threats.

It saddens me that, rather than truly analyzing the researcher's report, the journalist simply chose to report "yet another vulnerability."