I mean, research funding is a huge problem, but half the problem is that journalists and reporters are largely people who went into English or Communications and stopped taking or learning any science past the high school level and thus don't actually know how to read papers or report on them. Not to mention that critically reading a scientific paper and evaluating in the context of other research takes a significant amount of time, more time than is given to write a normal newspaper article.

And they're reporting that science to people who on average know the same or less than them, so their mistakes and misreporting is never caught or corrected.