I mean, I would love to make it illegal for a journalist to say "The science says X" when the science does not say X, but understand that for nearly all science, a journalist is not equipped to know that!

Journalists are not scientists, and they are especially not scientists, and they do not have the foundation and fundamentals necessary to evaluate whether a paper backs up what a university PR department tells them to publish.

The wealth of human knowledge is insanely vast, and basically infinitely recursive. A scientist in one tiny niche of physics can barely evaluate the papers of a scientist in another tiny niche of physics. Most niches in most sciences can't even fill an auditorium with experts.

The most important thing to know in science is that if you are not reading the actual paper, you aren't getting scientific information but rather someone's interpretation and marketing copy. The second most important thing to know is that if you haven't written a scientific paper in the same domain, you will likely struggle to accurately interpret the results of one.

When everyone was freaking out over LK-99, none of the losers on here or twitter were able to accurately assess the situation, and plenty of people outright bought the lies of that russian furry who claimed to be able to reproduce it, despite any evidence. It took actual domain experts, who were always emphatic that it didn't have good enough evidence to get too excited.

There was a similar situation during the "Cold Fusion" nonsense in 1989. A couple chemists did some mediocre science and went on a PR tour with their "findings", quite literally saying their data was unquestionable and the rest of science needed to adapt their theories to the cold fusion data, which meanwhile was unpublished. These two fairly well trained and practiced scientists went and asked congress for something like $25 million on next to no data. An entire conference of Chemists cheered for them and their "findings". The findings were always invalid. Their experiments never generated the kinds of products you would expect from fusing deuterium.

If even a room full of trained chemists cannot evaluate other chemists making downright basic errors in their research, how can we possibly expect average people with no scientific experience to keep up?

I'd focus on politicians and corporations who lie through their teeth first, not journalists. I'd focus on the blatant and provably wrong statements, like where a politician says they did this thing to bring jobs to their constituents when in fact they voted against the bill

Oh absolutely, I've long railed on about how absurdly weak and pitiful "truth in advertising" laws are in the US, but suggesting that a homeopathic medicine should not be able to call itself a "remedy" or "medicine" or anything like that drives people absolutely insane in the US. How dare you ~take away~ slightly change the label on my sugar pills!

Consider that, if you pay someone to say something as a "testimonial", you can say basically whatever you want and face no legal consequences. It shouldn't be the job of the average consumer to take corps to court for selling shit based on lies, yet it is.