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Without even touching the gay/trans contradiction, this quoted part is one of my bugaboos. As journalism has firmly become more focused on persuasion over reporting, I hear this kind of unsubstantiated statement-of-worldview-as-fact so often from journalists and it always makes my head ache. Very often, concrete statements like this will be done absent of any actual investigation. I listen to a handful of daily short-form headlines podcasts from major organizations, and the base-stealing that goes on is nearly criminal.
For example, very often in news stories about Trump's election claims, the claims will be described by reporters as lies, whereas they are really claims without sufficient proof, which is different. They may in fact be lies, but the statement that they are lies is also often a claim without sufficient proof. Now, I happen to think that they are likely fantasy/wishful thinking, so I am on the side of those who by default disbelieve them, but I also try to maintain some epistemic humility. Most of the claims, as I understand it, have never actually been investigated beyond superficial questioning of motivated participants and taking or rejecting their word as befits the reporter's pre-established narrative.
You see this a lot in environmental reporting, where causality is assigned to "climate change" without attribution. We also saw in a lot of COVID reporting the annoying new pattern of new stories with headlines in the pattern of "No, (insert party) didn't (insert dissenting claim)..." which smugly "corrected" assumed misinformation without ever investigating the veracity of the claim. This example, No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=41cb66e65585), discusses why the claim is likely not true, and lists the weakman arguments it purports to debunk, but even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.
How much do you want to bet that the CNN panelist asserting that conversion therapy has been "debunked" could not cite a single study to that effect, but would more likely point to popular culture, like books/movies such as "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," "But I'm a Cheerleader," and "Boy Erased?"
In particular, the article concludes with "There is no compelling reason to believe that P is true," while the headline says "There is compelling reason to believe that P is false."
It is worth remembering that reporters do not write the headlines that appear above their articles. The headline over an article in the "Science" section is written by a generalist sub-editor who knows even less about science than a science journalist does.
That is merely a defense of the reporter in question, but not at all a defense of the media source. If they let their employees systemically tell falsehoods, then that media source systemically tells falsehoods.
That doesn't seem to hold them back from substituting the actual claims in the article with their own beliefs, always in the same politically correct direction. That goes beyond incompetence.
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