But if this job is hard already for professional journalists on a full-time job, how exactly is an average person with no background knowledge and limited time and attention supposed to do it?

To me this argument sounds like "Sometimes life vests are faulty, therefore they provide a false sense of security, therefore we should get rid of all life vests and just hope people have good swimming skills".

> There are plenty of legitimate studies on those sides, fact checking them away would be lying.

If they are legitimate, why would a fact checker say otherwise?