It would help if journalists would hold anyone's feet to the fire these days. Science journalism is so bad at this that it seems to drive scientists to create low-quality studies.
Retraction Watch (source: https://retractionwatch.com) and independent consultants like Elisabeth Bik (article about her in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z) are good for this, though they aren't really traditional media. ProPublica and large newspapers (e.g. The New York Times occasionally) do publish investigative work on science topics sometimes too.
So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste university press releases.
In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the population because they can sense that nobody is challenging the "experts".