I think it is wrong to blanket the media with comments such as "bottom feeding scum" and otherwise imply that they are all incompetent buffoons. However when certain elements of the profession (in particular Channel 7 Australia) are still, a week after the event and some days after the cause is all but known, reporting the damage to the QANTAS 747 as having occurred to "the undercarriage" it really does make one wonder about the quality of their research.
Unfortunately for QANTAS the spotlight is now well and truely on them and every single "incident" will be noticed and reported even though most of these are simple, minor, spontaneously occurring maintenance issues, which were no doubt occurring anyhow. In any vehicle with umpteen million parts the odds of one or more breaking at any one time has to be quite high; that, surely, is why so many redundancies are built in. It's to be expected that those breakages won't always occur in such a way that they will fall conveniently into the maintenance time frames.
Had it been Virgin who were unfortunate enough to have an Oxy bottle let go, they would be the bad boys of choice instead right now, although, as they don't currently have members of their own staff suggesting that they have problems with their maintenance standards they might have got off a bit easier.
The media, and the general public, hear these comments and in the absence of anything to the contrary naturally make up their own minds.