Yes, and exacerbating the problem is that the original memo, even with its citations included, was sloppy and not rigorous, and should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for all the media covering it.

But instead most of the media coverage seemed to be coming from a frame of, "don't validate fringe viewpoints by actually addressing their arguments", rather just ignore their arguments and use other tactics to undermine them. That strategy may have worked in the pre-Internet age, but in the Internet age it risks putting you on the wrong side of "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.". In the Internet age the correct strategy for dealing with the fringe is directly addressing and discrediting their reasoning early, before they can create an echo chamber feedback loop.

But traditional media seems slow in general to realize that, in the Internet age, the fringe eventually defines the center unless stopped early. This episode appears to have been another manifestation of that.