Why does science news suck so much?

> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

I would also argue that science sucks in it's current state as well. It's all about Hirsch-Index. Looking as scientific and complicated as possible, so other scientist want to quote you and the Hirsch-Index rises. Also if numbers don't fit, they will be made fit. Fake or not doesn't really matter because no one will ever read it anyways. See the auto generating tools for papers and positive submission of them. This is by all means not the case for all scientist. There are lots of good, talented people there. But they get overshadowed by the previous mentioned.

> it's that all news is that bad.

I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever.

But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. And the journalist might not have had those years, despite them having to explain it in a simpler way to an audience which might even know less. A good journalist writing about any other topic might be able to grasp a topic quite firmly when they prepare for a week or two, but something as complex as the bleeding edge of any scientific field will be extremely hard to grasp at times for them (understandably so).

Now the issue is: to explain a complicated issue in a very simple fashion requires more proficiency in that subject, not less.

the real question is why aren't they just publishing the abstract with a doi link

It's true, many of the problems Sabine Hossenfelder cited about science news apply just as well to news about any topic.

But is the news categorically "bad"? No.

Certainly there are awful news outlets, terrible journalists, stories which never get the treatment they deserve, and a downward spiral of sensationalism and disinformation. But journalism still serves a purpose. Someone can still read news articles about topics which they aren't expert in and still be reasonably informed about the basics of whatever is going on with those topics.

Are things going to get oversimplified, improperly cited, or have background material glossed over or omitted? sure, but one simply can't write academic papers in a newspaper and expect the general public to spend the time and effort to read them.

There ARE some long form news outlets that take deeper dives, but they have a decidedly academic feel to them, which is fine for audiences who are motivated for that but these just don't fly with regular folks who just want to know what's happening and satisfy some curiosity.