[adhesive_wombat]

> Filtering technical knowledge into a relevant format for a listener to comprehend in real time is a skill that can be learnt.

Sadly, not a skill most "scientific journalists" appear to have learned. There's a difference between "make understandable" and "dumb down to complete context-free drivel"[1].

And that's before the aforementioned "journalist" takes a single press release from a university PR department at face value rather than doing, well, journalism.

[1]: or maybe this is just https://xkcd.com/2501 on my behalf

[SamoyedFurFluff]

My understanding of what might be going on here is broken telephone with intent. A reporter gleans only a subset of information from a given body of research, then ends up reporting only on what portions they consider to be essential. The end result loses nuance and context.

I don’t think reporters want to be doing this, but society doesn’t incentivize serious reporting in of itself.