> Why does science news suck so much?
Gee, back some weeks ago at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463927
I presented my opinion:
"... the worst bottleneck in civilization, bad documentation of computer hard/software, ... "
And my opinion would be similar on nearly all less important topics, that is, not really bottlenecks for civilization.
Long my usual summary view has been that the MSM (mainstream media) has some traditions: Create narratives as in E. Bernays. Repeat those narratives as in Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. J. Goebbels and his famous
"If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it.".
Then have the media outlets gang up, pile on, form a mob, and repeat the most recently selected narratives over and over. Do this with deceptive "click bait" headlines to get eyeballs for ad revenue and, maybe, to push some specific political agenda. A little more generally, have the writing borrow from formula fiction and belle lettre, that is, with my view of such literature, create VEFEEE -- vicarious escapist fantasy experience emotional entertainment.
The technique is to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, nearly never between the ears.
Missing are, say, the standards of common high school term papers with careful quotes of credible, hopefully primary references, etc.
Also usually missing is a goal of providing objective, credible information as needed by an informed electorate or credible information for any purpose, science, cooking, parenting, software development, much more in careers, finance, ....
Also nearly totally missing is credible, meaningful presentations of quantitative data, e.g., statistical hypothesis tests with stated probabilities of Type I and Type II errors. Actually, far simpler than hypothesis tests, the media commonly is unable even to report percentages carefully. E.g., instead we get some
"up 7.60%"
without since when, measured how, by whom, reported where? And, why is this not just some case of cherry picking? What about corrections for inflation? What about over more points in time than just two? What about causes?
While generally I'm outraged at the writing and content in the media, apparently some people like it. So, my condemnations have to be just my own opinions.
E.g., my standard remark about the NYT and WaPo is that
"On paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads."
but lots of people like the NYT and WaPo and disagree with me.
Maybe due to bad writing lots of old media outlets are losing readers and, thus, ad revenues and are on the way to massive change or just out of business, now to be replaced by new media on the Internet, media that gets to save on ink and paper. Maybe. I can wish but can't be very confident.
Let's give the Internet and its new media a few more years and see if some greater variety of content sprouts up from the landscape.