You need to go to academic and professional journals to read comprehensive presentation of data and conclusions in the fields you're interested in. Articles in newspapers, social media, and general interest magazines use intellectual "helper" techniques such as storytelling to hook general readers in--they're usually aiming at about the 9th-10th grade education level.

Many article writers are serving the purpose of interpreting higher level scholarship for lay readers. They're doing their job. You just need to fly at a higher altitude and get closer to the sources. The drawback to reading source material is that the paywalls are more expensive and the focus can be extremely narrow. You go to newspapers for curation but they necessarily aim low.

That said, if an analogy is not spot on, that's a failure of the writer and the editor. Unfortunately you can get bad writing even in the NYT, but dailies are going to have less quality control than quarterlies.