Bitcoin has had a ton of positive publicity recently and nobody ever complains when positive publicity is based on hyperbole rather than fact.
Bitcoin is absolutely being traded like a commodity at the moment. It's naive to believe that the majority of people speculating on Bitcoin prices right now intend to hold them long term or use them to purchase things. Many of them will dump their coins when there's little volatility.
Yes, there's a lot of lazy journalism. This applies to both the good and the bad. Time after time inaccurate articles start off on arstechnica or wired and nobody does any fact-checking before they start appearing everywhere else. That's equally true of mainstream news stories.
For every person who wants Bitcoin to "go mainstream", there's another Bitcoin user who thinks that could kill Bitcoin and that the emphasis should be on it being a disruptive technology.
There's no cohesive "Bitcoin agenda". Nor does there need to be. People want and expect different things from Bitcoin and they use it for different reasons and in different ways. It's not surprising, then, that media reporting regarding Bitcoin is all over the place and rarely balanced.
It's pretty much up to each of the groups with an agenda (whether it's the "mainstreamers" or the crypto-anarchists), to take responsibility for getting the kinds of stories they'd like to see about Bitcoin published - bearing in mind that each group will likely be displeased by a report regarded as "positive" by the other.
Bitcoin unfortunately still connotes "drugs", "gambling", or other illegal things, even though these have now become very small portions of the Bitcoin economy.
They are the vast majority of the bitcoin economy. Show me a business processing more revenue in BTC than SatoshiDice/Sealswithclubs/silk road. BFL and Avalon don't really count. The major advantages of bitcoin lend themselves perfectly to these activities and is its best chance of growing as a currency and not just a commodity.
Silk Road does approximately 30000
BTC per month in sales. SatoshiDICE has 150000
BTC per month in gambles.
BTC-E deals with as many
BTC per month as SatoshiDICE. It's the
4th largest exchange, accounting for
4% of Bitcoin to fiat trading.
Bit-pay processes $5.2 million USD monthly. That's about 80000
BTC at the March weighted average.
BTCGuild mines 36% of all mined bitcoins. In the past month, that was over 50000
BTC.
No, Bitcoin is not "mostly used for gambling and drugs".