Science Journalism Criticism

Scientists aren't the ones doing crappy journalism

The OP was about how pop-sci reports the paper, not the science itself.

It sounds like your problem is with sensationalized science journalism, not science itself. In which case, yeah, we all agree with you.

Basically, you can't take any science reporting major media at face value. The headlines are written as click-bait, and typically in a non-scientific fashion. Some scientists are also prone to releasing catchy PR that misinterprets their results.

"science journalism" is almost always more confusion than enlightenment

That's headline writers, not scientists...

Science isn't the problem. It's lay people ingesting their information from dumbed down articles written by professional journalists looking to sell more newspapers or get more clicks. Even if these studies were free and not stuck behind a paywall, your average person will not bother to read the details. Maybe it's human nature to want to be told what to believe. No one has time to do the independent research on every little thing they hear or read.

Why are mainstream press science articles always so sensationalist?

As another comment notes, the strength of science is that if something is true, it will still be true even if a report about the fact is initially exaggerated or initially ignored. Over the long haul, people who commit themselves to finding out about replicated results that are consistent with the previous established principles of science will gradually gain a better understanding of reality. Someday, we have hope of understanding our brains and how we think better than we understand that now.

I agree. This sort of article is partly the reason why we so often here something like "science can't make up its mind" or "x is good now but was bad before, and will be bad again soon".Instead of sharing accurate information about the findings of these researchers, news organizations use them to write catchy, clickbait-y articles. Needless to say, researchers are often to blame as well, since they participate in interviews using vague language so that they can benefi