This always bugs me, because “science” is a giant spectrum of fields from astronomy to zoology. Nobody knows even a small portion of it, and yet we expect a few journalists to cover all of it, often on tight deadlines[0]. Politics is probably closer to many journalists’ backgrounds, and it changes slower—-last week’s background helps with this week’s scandal too.

[0] The impetus for most articles is usually the publication of a new paper, but this always seems weird because it’s really more of a hook: papers are almost always incremental progress on a problem and most of the article ends up being background and context anyway.