Why does science news suck so much?

"Terrible" reportage can indeed mean getting quotes wrong and basic established facts incorrect.

But it also covers simplifying things for a (somewhat educated) lay audience, making decisions about what to include and exclude, and including perspectives that some experts may take issue with.

Certainly, it would be nice if many journalists had a better background in what they're writing about. But it's also a case that experts can have unreasonable expectations about the depth and nuance of something written for the more or less general public.

Nothing new here, this has been a steadily increasingly problem: media outlets generally don't hire people with even a basic scientific eduction to do science journalism. A lot of this has to do with the 'expert propaganda' phenomenon - corporations and government have a list of so-called experts that they want the journalists to act as stenographers for, and the media corporations oblige by hiring ignorant journalists who will just repeat whatever they're told. This suits the interests of pharmaceutical corporations ('buy our wonderful new Vioxx drug! don't ask us about flaws in clinical trial design!), financial fraudsters ('our expert economists say get an adjustable rate loan! it's the way of the future!), and similar types.

Here's a similar discussion from a decade ago, a rather defensive piece from a journalist:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-sci...

Corporate media is, more often than not, just a mouthpiece for state and corporate propaganda, and the types of journalists who succeed in that environment are just pliable weathervanes who do what their editors tell them to do, and the editors do what the owners tell them to do, and hey, meet the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos whose AWS got a $600 million CIA contract for web services, so no more investigative journalism like Top Secret America, please!

As far as the main points Hossenfelder raises, i.e. basic concepts like original sources, range of uncertainties, margins of error, unquestioning reliance on press releases, alternative hypothesis, understanding of how mathematical models of physical phenomena are tested against observational data - well, that might force the public to think about what they're reading. That's not the job of the corporate media, they're not there to encourage critical thinking - they're there to take complex topics, simplify them to the point where a small child could understand them, and then repeat, repeat, repeat. That's the essence of propaganda tactics.

Tech news / "journalism" is even worse.

Are you implying that, historically, journalists either 1) had some basic education in what they are reporting about, or 2) actually wanted to educate themselves in what they are reporting about, and that today, increasingly, journalists don't or don't want to do either 1) or 2)?

That is, at it's core, saying that journalists are, on average, getting more and more stupid.

This seems a bit strange and unsubstantiated, but could very well be true. What would cause a gradual decrease in the intelligence of humanity's journalists?

Or are things like science just getting more complex (more specialized) that an average journalists requires "too much" time to educate themselves about. That would then mean they aren't getting less intelligent, per se...