Perhaps the best thing that can come out of this is a journalist code of practice for reporting of SAR events.(probably needed for the people running the media briefings as well.) The reporting of this incident has been worse than the SAR operations.
1) report all times as UTC with a conversion to local time for your readers
2) separate fact from interpretation - last secondary surveillance contact at lat/long at time(UTC) - interpreted to mean that a power failure occurred
3) report data as given rather than try to interpret for your readers - ie the radar contact in the straights - state a contact was observed - not that it was the missing aircraft.
4) state sources - if you pick up a Reuters feed attribute to the source publication - so translations etc can be cross checked.
5) don't try to read subtle meanings into the language of non native English speakers
6) publish corrections to articles when shown to be misleading - ie the mobile phone ringing reports.
7) speak to technical experts ie telecoms engineers for the mobile phone reports / aircraft engineers for ACARS etc.