An episode of Royal Pains had a case of a young musician with symptoms. The first thought was possibly ME/CFS. As the show developed, it was revealed she was poisoned by, I think anthrax. It treated ME/CFS is genuine and debilitating. (Well, in the conversation, it did. The patient didn't look real sick. But hey, that's true for many of us.)
House is known for being a jerk, that's the schtick. So, it would be appropriate for him to be insensitive. And we can't say that some people who get the symptoms of growing old might look online and see aches, pains, trouble with memory, fatigue and decide they may have ME/CFS. I had the opposite situation. I was developing the symptoms and assumed I was getting older and overworked. But it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. I didn't realize how much I had adjusted my activities to work around these symptoms. Finally, the sharp pains started rotating all over my body. Along with everything else, at that point, I knew something was very wrong.
Like everything else, "the media" is made up of lots of different people and companies. Each one is going to handle things differently. In my local city, I know a reporter who covered CFS. He has a high school friend with the disease. So he brings more knowledge to it. Also, there are a lot of people in LA who have it, but stay in the closet. In the 1980s, it was Hollywood's other secret. So, that generation of movie / TV writers are familiar with it. Golden Girls had an episode on the disease because the writer for the show has it.
But just as there are docs that know a whole lot, docs that recognize it is biological and disabling but don't know much more and docs that are ignorant and biased, the same is true for media.
Tina