> I'm sure I fall victim to this when reading outside my expertise as well, i.e. when reading about genetics stuff or quantum computing.
I try to avoid this by focusing on the content, not who the researchers are. If they can do some cool new thing with mosquito genetics, now I know that. I don't need to know whether the specific paper being hyped is novel or whether 95% of the content was proved by someone else: that's a task for the Nobel committee and I wouldn't recognise the researchers' names again anyway.
But even when you're note reading a university publication/PR piece, you still see this effect. One big player like a famous lab at Stanford or MIT publishes an incremental paper that is a followup on a well known existing research direction, where several groups are working in parallel on very similar things, and then it's presented as if it was some breakthrough and the whole subfield was invented by them right now.
It's very, very hard for outsiders to recognize this and to really understand what the actual incremental step in a particular paper is. Necessarily, when explaining to laypeople, you can only scratch the surface and present the rought idea of a whole big research field, and it gets really murky what is part of the established, pre-existing research field and what is the novel contribution.
I'm sure I fall victim to this when reading outside my expertise as well, i.e. when reading about genetics stuff or quantum computing.