> Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.
If you step back and think of "politics" as "the science of human behaviour" then Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) is still a worthwhile read. *
It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_ConsentIn short, TLDR, mass media (eg: The Economist) tends to take the path of most return (sales, eyeballs) for least effort.
AKA it's much cheaper to be lazy.
They don't have the resources to have experts in every technical domain that sit about and read as many newly released papers as they can in order to pick out the gold for you.
They (and many other such public media newsrooms) skim the press packs sent out by university media teams, by political party media teams, the feeds curated by Reuters, third party summary feeds of stock market news releases, etc.
On the big stories the larger papers can spare the time of gumshoe investigative reporters to dig into the heart of an event as best they can. Specialist public journals (such as, say, New Scientist) will background and go into more of the lesser stories specific to their domain (it's The New York Times of anglosphere science).
But a great deal of the news that you see is first order lazy reporting, it's ideally assembled by reshaping press releases of self serving sources with a few phones calls, but more often than not it is nothing more than entire blocks of PR material 'plagiarized' as written with nary a phone call to fact check the basics.
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* Worthwhile regardless of political party preferences, opinions on Chomsky, whether you thoroughly read the entire book or just skim to get a feel of the thesis and arguments made.