[Zak]

Being a layman in more fields than I am an expert, and having a habit of reading journal articles in various fields when the mainstream press reports on their findings, I have to disagree.

Of course, I can't (usually) read a journal article in a field in which I am a layman and understand it well enough to attempt to replicate its findings, critique its methodology, or make a follow-on contribution to the field. That's not the only value one might extract from a journal article.

What I can do is figure out if the mainstream press reporting on the article actually matches what the researchers found. The most common issue I see in mainstream press reporting is over-broad conclusions like "X is a cure for cancer" instead of "X is a 10% more effective treatment for Y type of cancer". Correlation reported as causation when the research did not draw such a conclusion is also annoyingly common.