The article is about how well AI models misrepresent the content of news, not how often they misrepresent reality. My point is that even if the AI models make no errors when representing news content, they'll still be quite inaccurate when reality is the benchmark.
Who cares if AI does a good job representing the source, when the source is crap?
Yes, if AI represents news, and news tries (and often fails) to represent reality, then AI would represent reality 0.55*0.55 of the time, taking both your claim and BBC's claim as true. That is even worse than the already low bar for news you and I agree on.