It’s not just a problem with journalism but with humans in general. People are more imprecise with their comprehension of things than they are willing to admit.
> Even here on HN, plenty of folks will comment on all kinds of research they know little about.
I don't see anything wrong with that, because all opinions are not equal.
I think there is some level of pressure to get one's word in quickly, otherwise the nebulous cloud of commenters moves on to the next story, and your well-thought-out comment that took hours to write is seen by no-one. If you're responding to someone hoping to get into a nice conversation, you're out of luck since they have no idea you just responded to them.
Anything related to medicine/biochemistry can get cringe-y pretty quickly here. I think the problem is that the crowd here is generally pretty intelligent, but they know it and it's a coefficient > 1 on the Dunning-Kruger effect
If the information was given solely to public security experts with blog presence (Matthew Green, Bruce Schneier, and a plethora of others) we could've linked to them and either ignore the 'clickbait middleman' or do most of the work for them allowing them an easier time to write up something half decent.
Matthew Green once publicly criticized something I created by simply parroting what someone else had said without bothering to do his own investigation. The original criticism turned out to be hogwash, and Matthew failed to recognize an obvious real crypto problem with the first version of my feature because he was too busy trying to just quickly stick his name into someone else's feature announcement while it was still "hot off the press."
I would take anything Matthew Green blogs about with a grain of salt. It's not clear how much of what he says is just cheap amplification of what others claim.
Youtube titles with CAPITALIZED words make me sad. I don't want to click on any video with a title like that, but creators are incentivized to use those titles because they get more views. Some fine videos end up with those titles and I would miss out on some good stuff if I refuse to click on clickbait titles.