Why do they lie?

Tim Kurkjian lied to me this morning:

"(Manny) being out allowed guys like Andre Ethier to become an even bigger part of that offense, and boy has he been good since Ramirez went out..."

Now, Andre Ethier has done some things in Manny's absence - he had a 3 HR game, he had a 2 HR game, he had some walk off basehits. Granted. But this is what Andre Ethier has done in Manny's 50 game absence overall (with the national league average for 2009, including pitchers, in parentheses):

BA: .222 (.257)
OBP: .297 (.330)
SLG: .438 (.404)
OPS: .735 (.734)
wOBA: .318 (.333)

(For the uninitiated, wOBA is a kind of overall offensiverun production stat calibrated to .333 being average).

So he is moderately outslugging the league, including all of those pitchers and catchers and scrawny second basemen, and as a consequence his OPS is average. Average, not "good." And those other stats are way below average. How do I know this? Because Ethier has been sitting on my fantasy bench, grinning at me and busting out with very occasional big nights (the aforementioned 3 HR game, the walk-offs, etc.) while being mediocre if not subpar the majority of the time. If you play fantasy at all, you know this is jsut annoying, because you can't afford to play him, and yet you look like an idiot when you miss his breakout games. He has been badly missing Manny, if anything, these past 50 games, and irking me in the process.

So my larger question is: why does TK not know this? Or if he does know this, why does he identify it as "good?" Why does he present an "expert opinion" that is patently false? Why do we tolerate this? Maybe it was just a flippant side mark and, like your average human being, he was basing a large scale assessment on the outlier, highly touted and therefore more easily memorable games. But seeing as he's an expert, you would think he would manage to get beyond the highlight-watching part of the job. I have no opinion of TK orhis reporting, and I don't even mean to imply that he in particular was at fault or that he does this routinely; I really just want to emphasize the question: why do we make and/or permit such casual assertions that fly in the face of easily accessible information?