It's not that you can't work in reverse and get an estimate, its just that you can't know if it is accurate. What if the journalist made a mistake in their inflation calculation?
They are clearly rounding to the inflation adjusted number, and we don't know what year they received payment.
That's a good point. Trusting your math of a selection of people that are typically bad at math, and that have a bad track record of accuracy in general, is probably not a good idea.
To your second point, you're probably right. Journalism is in a sad state these days.