Are protected members/fields really that bad?

Question

Now if you read the naming conventions in the MSDN for C# you will notice that it states that properties are always preferred over public and protected fields. I have even

Answer 1

Public and/or protected fields are bad because they can be manipulated from outside the declaring class without validation; thus they can be said to break the encapsulation principle of object oriented programming.

When you lose encapsulation, you lose the contract of the declaring class; you cannot guarantee that the class behaves as intended or expected.

Using a property or a method to access the field enables you to maintain encapsulation, and fulfill the contract of the declaring class.