Media Bias or Lack of Incentives?

Some have made much of media bias in the reporting on issues such as global warming, the environment, the economy, etc. Bias could come from ideologic or political beliefs held by reporters or it may simply come from the lack of incentives to dig deeper into topics. After all, what incentives do reporters have for spending additional time when readers want mostly quickly read and easily digested summaries.

For example, take this on how the quality of US health care and the high mortality rates of the US is compared to other countries.

The main factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and prematurity. The way that these factors are reported—and how such babies are treated statistically—tells a different story than what the numbers reveal. Low birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth" statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates. According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 kg is not considered a living child.

But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies — considered "unsalvageable" outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive — is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics.Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when the main determinant of mortality — weight at birth — is factored in, Norway has no better survival rates than the United States....

In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth (take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered alive. If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a "miscarriage" and does not affect the country's reported infant mortality rates.... Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.

So are reporters who mislead by superficial reporting or omissions of information intentionally misleading us, or are the incentives of reporting such that in-depth reporting is not valued?