>"News" is singular. Now if you said "The data are suspect" then I admire that.

Ah, the fine distinction - news as a service is singular, and they have lots of news (plural) to tell us. And yes, I always found it a sad affair that English language never adopted datum (a given) for singular piece of data (which are plural - the given), so there's no word for podatak (or "данное" in Russian, where it's an adjective).

But nowadays one can't know who's male who's fe... um, what's singular what's plural: "windows HAS detected...", "it's a $19.99 savings".

>Worse still, people now refer to "the media" as singular ( "the media is to blame for the ..." or "You've lost data? I think your media {as in "your DISK" FGSakes!} is faulty"). This is when I wish gun laws were far less strict in this country

It's probably that the word medium (pl. media) has too many more important meanings - so if it said "I think your medium is faulty" it would be understood as "if you want to talk to ghosts, find someone else, this guy is a con", or "you tried to cheat, but I know you should wear at least L, if not XL - so I screwed your data".