I think journalism is getting worse as the years go by. Like everybody else I noticed the title and clicked on it a few days ago. Reading the paper revealed that the team was simply interpreting/speculating what the math was showing about some hypothetical energy density structures.
Of course the sensationalized title propagated all over the net ignoring the facts.
The realities of space travel are kind of grim: months to visit even nearby uninhabitable planets and decades to get anywhere interesting. Relativity has always been a huge and ever-increasing impediment to that, and the ways in which it is have percolated out. There's also the demand for hard science fiction with space battles (I personally am a fan!) that similarly runs aground on "you can't have a galactic empire where it takes a hundred years to reach the next province over".
So there's lots of demand for "hey this thing makes FTL travel possible" and not as much demand for "scientists publish paper but everything still sucks".
About a week ago this topic was widely in the news under variations of the title:
"DARPA and NASA Scientists Accidentally Create Warp Bubble"
That's the context of my response here in this thread. I am not sure if everyone reading this thread knows that. The new title "No, we didn't accidentally create a warp bubble" was the NASA engineer attempting to fix the misinformation generated by the journalists.
Absolutely agree with you about physics journalism. I enjoy science fiction books too, I have no problem with the theoretical FTL topic.
Not really quite the same though. The question is what the production function for articles looks like from the publisher/journalist perspective. If it's easier to produce clickbait articles than "real" articles then I think this effect is what we see in the market for news. But from another angle, it seems more labor intensive for a journalist to spin a weak finding into a strong finding than to simply report an exciting finding directly.
It makes me sad to think that I contribute to this process. I have to admit... that I probably do read alot of those clickbait articles giving them more views.
It makes me even more sad when I think about the platforms that are removing the ability to downvote incorrect/misleading information.
But to be fair and I think to support your point, the bastions of so-called 'real' journalism do seem to have gotten fewer and fewer.
Not sure what the solution is when the only way for these outlets to stay afloat is to get more and more clicks.
Everyone bemoans ad-financing, but everyone loves aggregators (including Hacker News), and aggregators and paywalls generally don't mix.
Ad free reddit, youtube, twitter, and the like, all populated only by people who paid to be there and not an ad or corporate sponsor in site except within a walled garden of delights (for the influencers)?
I'd pay $10 a month for that.
There are more journalists in prisons than ever before.
Attention is a currency and we are easily distracted.
In Russia or China, I can believe this. But in the USA and most of Europe, I'm going to need a citation before I believe that.