You lost me at NPR do a pretty great job at science reporting. In fact they are a punchline to the joke about how incredibly bad science reporting can be.
Right yeah. NPR great. NPR science reporting. Terrible. It's a shame. Sadly it's a strong pattern not a one off, hence the NPR search link on that site so you can satisfy yourself that "as heard on NPR" is anything but a strong signal of quality research.
And if we keep repeating that they'll likely fix it. It's absolutely fixable. NPR are not a total write off.
That website has logged 10 complaints in 13 years, most of them in 2016. This is a bit of a selection bias: yes, if you select the terrible examples, 100% of them will be terrible.
On the other hand, I listen daily to their flagship science show "Shortwave" and science-adjacent shows like "The Indicator" and their general news updates, and they are pretty great both in terms of being pedagogical and in not being misleading when they simplify something.
Same is true of criminal courts. "If you select only the examples of fraud of course my client looks like a fraudster."
Seriously if NPR had good science reporters why on earth aren't they tapping their colleagues on the shoulder and saying "Don't" or maybe "You need to correct that, it's NPR's reputation, not just yours." I mean, on the standards of popular journalism they're pretty bad. And NPR is the punchline when someone publishes research by media release fitting some model to noise and booking their TED talk[1]. NPR are always there.
[1] Some people think TED is good science too. Maybe it's not all garbage? I don't know, my search is not exhaustive once the pattern is established.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=Npr