>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.
Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
The journalist should have used the LLM to explain how this wasn’t a hack but a common mistake made by untrained workers.
Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
At the end of the day, we the audience reward the behavior unfortunately
You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too