By nature, journalists are not subject matter experts. Even in the height of our technological progress during the space race, the best they could do was call up a nationally recognized expert, get an oversimplified explanation, and publish a summary of that. The
true knowledge was locked into a small set of researcher circles running out of exclusive labs and in whatever they published or lectured about.
Journalism is the one part of this equation that has changed the least since then. The way I see it, there are two bigger forces at work:
- The demand that normal people have for this sort of knowledge. People today believe they should have a front row seat to everything and be an active participant. And to a lesser degree we have encouraged this as a society through television, social media, or even the way we assumed every student needed a well-rounded undergraduate college education.
- Academia has exploded in size and scope in the last century. The prestige, the hierarchy, the social ladder climbing, the funding battles, the publishing race, the sheer number of graduate students in these programs. These programs are meat grinders that pump out all sorts of noise and failed academics with grudges. We have conveniently forgot that there is a massive ongoing replication crisis that is still largely being ignored.
Journalists and scientists can point fingers at each other as much as they want and claim the other knows nothing about what they are speaking of. But at the end of the day the sheer amount of information (right and wrong) at our fingertips is bearing down on our society like a great weight ready to destroy us all.