The Fatal Enemy Of Journalists
Quite a lot of journalists across the world would like to believe that they are the torch-bearers of the truth and the propagators of the facts. For a proportion of them, this might as well be the case. The sense of ownership over truth in the case of journalists, however, often comes from a misguided source - their tendency to retaliate against the forces of the establishment. Such a retaliation, even within the high standards of investigative journalism, almost always is guided by a narrative. So, even the most sincere journalist is still never looking for truth but building a narrative. Very often, journalists try to fight the propaganda and hence conflate their narrative with the truth. Therefore, journalists feel that politicians, as the default perpetrators and benefactors of propaganda, are their enemies. However, the worst nightmare of a journalist can never be a politician who in turn is susceptible to the damages caused by the narratives. Journalists' fatal enemies are scientists.
Given any issue, the method of a scientist and that of a journalist are fundamentally divergent. Before I lay out the differences, it is pertinent to specify the commonalities. One can assume in good faith that both a scientist and a journalist have a curiosity for truth, and integrity to report it and that they do not basically suck at fact-finding. Even then, a journalist would hate what a scientist has to say on a topic where their interests collide. My argument is that such a collision, when it happens, is due to the differences in approaches despite similar motivations.
Null hypothesis test
Whenever a scientist sets out to test their idea (of truth), they are supposed to assume that their idea does not hold true. In a fancy way, a scientist trying to find an "effect" sets out assuming a null (zero) effect. Then the scientist's job is to spend their life and every drop of blood and sweat to show that the assumption of the null does not hold for the conclusion. This is unlike a journalist, who is motivated to find an "effect" and then tries to collect all the possible information that supports their idea (of truth). The latter approach is clearly more susceptible to the expression of the investigator's bias.
Interest in the average
Scientists are usually (but not always) interested in the averages to be able to explain the phenomenon at hand in a more general sense. Journalists often find that reporting on extreme values is profitable. Scientists would measure the state of society using (say) the GDP per capita. While journalists like to show poor people going hungry or the rich fighting over their membership in the billionaire club. Scientists, of any kind, would be interested in disease outbreaks; journalists would want a pandemic to report about.
Bottom-up social views
Anecdotally, scientists often construct their social views in an evolving fashion based on the accumulating evidence that they encounter. Hence, their social viewpoints tend to be dynamic over time and might lead them to contradict their younger selves. The bottom-up approach to building up views about things around you can bring peace to the inner self and outer community, although it comes with the cost of coming forth as indecisive at times. Journalists tend to enforce their social views not just on the world but even on their work, putting them in a state of cognitive dissonance. The struggle is commonly visible in the popular category of news that embodies one thing while arguing for another. For instance, a journalist with a bow tie sitting in a comfy studio arguing that he is the voice of the poor, struggling to hide his privilege.
To be clear, scientists or journalists are not exactly people but tendencies within people and a lot of us consist of their amalgam of sorts. Professional scientists sometimes give in to their journalistic idealism to say things that might make them "look good" while losing their analytical credibility. Journalists who try to be more scientist-like end up getting fired from news networks that find their methods too upsetting to the viewers. The fatal enemies can only agree when a journalist invites a hand-picked scientist for their "expertise" on a narrative that the journalist is fond of. However, whenever you find yourself an audience to such chicanery, remind yourself that the truth has already gotten political at the event of mating (and I meant mating, not meeting).