I’m inclined to lay cause for the decline on AI (not so much AI scientists IMO, but it’s illuminating to see how badly they’re perceived), people are rightfully distrustful of hallucinating LLMs, and often have personal experience of how easy it is to get one to spit out a plausible sounding argument for whatever you want. I suspect you’d find a similar or greater decline for media and journalism, for the same reasons, at least, so I hope, although echo chambers probably mitigate the effect.

The ability to tell ChatGPT to ‘Write me an article scientifically proving X’, e.g. vaccines are harmful, the sky is red, the earth is flat, and have it diligently come up with some reasonable sounding codswallop is genuinely scary. Add to that the ongoing removal of critical thinking from the educational landscape, and you’ve got vast swathes of the population who know deep down that something is wrong with a lot of what they hear, but can’t put their finger on exactly what. Seems like a recipe for anxiety.