I guess that a whole lot of the 'Ash Emergency' reporting from the Meeja generally is examples of 'Never let a Few Facts get in the way of a Good Story'.
Even the Flightglobal story reporting no significant damage to the F-18 engines, with a by-line of 23/4/10 was followed the very next day in the same magazine with 'Europe's volcanic ash response: was it adequate?' which mentioned the original 'reported' F-18 damage but not, strangely enough
, the previous day's 'no damage' story. I haven't ploughed through the literally 100s of VA references just in Flightglobal to try to judge their attempts to balance what was published but my guess is that they were also to some degree cheerleaders on the 'High VA risk - We're all gonna die' bandwagon. Given Flightglobal's position as an industry-specialist publication and particularly its own masthead (Serious about Aviation), this is disappointing.
It would be a bit of a stretch to envisage a conspiracy in which someone hijacked the NTSB website and planted a faked-up story about the Citation CJ incident so as to place it well before VA became an issue!!!