One thing I’ll note about this: it’s easy to think that I’m just talking about political news, but this 100% applies to “science journalism” as well. The scientific news cycle is so horribly broken (which I see as a major contributor to stuff like the reproducibility crisis), and I think a big part of the reason is that people have taken to following science happening “up to the minute”, and as a result the only things that get covered as news are early-phase research papers — and ones that give surprising results!
Both of these things make it much more likely that any conclusions drawn from them would be spurious!
I would really love it if there were a cultural norm that science journalism aimed at the general public would not publish stories about anything until it’s accepted widely enough to be included in textbooks.
Instead, no one reads textbooks but they read the science section of the newspaper, which spouts out nonsense (and contradictory nonsense) that never gets any further scrutiny or coverage, and the public gets a horrible misunderstanding about both the nature of science and the nature of the universe. ☹
