Actually I think both cancer and plastics needs to remain as jargon for their respective fields, and instead media should focus on specifying the important elem

Actually I think both cancer and plastics needs to remain as jargon for their respective fields, and instead media should focus on specifying the important elements that are easily digestible to the public and also not too wide reaching. Somewhat of a lost art apparently. To stay with your example, it would be like discouraging the media from saying "cancer is cured" when they actually might mean "this specific type of lung cancer has a cure". To bring it back to "plastic", the media could focus on saying things like "teflon coating encourages these negative reactions..." as opposed to "plastics are poisoning us" which is way too vague to matter.