It's not that science (or tech) news is bad, it's that all news is that bad. We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. The next time you're reading an article about some field you're not an expert in, try to remember that it is just as bad as the news in your area of expertise.
There’s also a new sub-field that explores topics through data and they’re usually quite excellent.
Such pieces often turn into books or a series because it’s difficult to condense it all into one article. My favorite example is the article series about illegal plutonium experiments by the US Government on civilians where they injected poor (and mostly minority) people and dying children with plutonium just to see what would happen.
The articles forced disclosure from the US Govt. in the form of an executive order and led to the book, The Plutonium Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files
> The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.[3] The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere.
You should be able to read it here, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/86870...
Another great example is the assassination of the head of Iran’s nuclear program by the NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc...
It’s a beautiful example of great journalism.
If you notice both pieces took a lot of time to compile and were about events that had happened in the past. It’s much more difficult to do this with breaking news, which is where the “all news is bad” perception comes from.
News can be great. Given enough time and research.