Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But tha

Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But that's knowledge, not a skill. Good journalists rely on experts, and better journalists rely on multiple experts (for a topic, but also over time) to derive a sense of what's unknown and uncertain in a field. On social media nothing is ever unknown because there's always a large and emphatic group--some of whom will have PhDs, MDs, and other high-quality credentials--telling you with absolute certainty the way things are, and that's reflected in modern journalism. Not necessarily the certainty, per se, as outside academia the certainty of most information is inflated; but the shear breadth and depth of what's reported. To be clear, "young" to me includes people in their 30s and 40s, which also happens to be my age group. I've been watching in real-time the turnover over the past several years of radio journalists (NPR affiliates, etc) and print publications and I definitely see a change. The level of credulity is much too high, as is the level of partisanship. For nearly 15 years I disagreed vehemently with claims that such outlets were too partisan (notwithstanding FOX News and similar outlets), but over the past several years I can no longer sustain such defenses. The latest generation of journalists don't believe they're partisan because they believe the information they share is rooted in science, but real science is contingent, and the further away you get from hard science the greater the uncertainty in various claims, but because "science" discourse has become pseudo-religious and partisan the reality of this is lost. When you read a research paper, coming across the complexity and diversity of approaches and results is one of the most important aspects of the experience. It's difficult for experts, let alone journalists, to convey uncertainty and inconsistency. That's why it's so important, if you can, to read primary sources yourself. It doesn't matter whether you can understand the chemistry or calculus behind results. You can simply take the results and claims at face value, which in the vast majority of cases is how they'll be presented to you through the media. What matters is synthesizing the importance of the gaps that come into focus after reading many papers in a field.