A lot o today's journalistic content should more properly be tagged as covert advertising. To facilitate this, media editors have hired science beat reporters

A lot o today's journalistic content should more properly be tagged as covert advertising. To facilitate this, media editors have hired science beat reporters with apparently very little science background - and their job is to repeat what the designated experts - the ones the editors have assigned them to interview - more or less verbatim. They don't want reporters asking the experts probing questions of any kind, that's not in the job description, and the reporters don't even know what kinds of questions to ask. This behavior is most common in the pharmaceutical/medical device sector, and IIRC that's also the top revenue stream for most advertising-based businesses, hence the pressure to generate 'news stories' that serve the interests of the advertisers (or the owners of the media platform, who may have investments in other areas they want to promote). A good recent example is the hype effort surround the weight-loss drug Ozempic, but it's been a pattern of behavior for some decades now, although I imagine social media platforms are currently getting a large fraction of the outlay: https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/11/untold-story-tvs-first-prescription-drug-ad/ https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/11/untold-story-tvs-first-p... > "The industry had won. Spending on all direct-to-consumer advertising ballooned from $360 million in 1995 to $1.3 billion in 1998. By 2006, it hit $5 billion, and most of that was on television commercials."