I see your point but from my perspective, in most places there's a trickle of good stuff and a flood of junk. I try to offset that by occasionally reading a virology or epidemiology paper myself and listening to TWiV when I get the time. The thing that's striking to me is how different that picture is from middlebrow sources, in which I include a lot of the mainstream press. For example, their scare stories every time a new variant comes out is cookie-cutter journalism (and is basically crying wolf for when something notable does happen, like delta).