Well, I don’t agree with your opinion of Science News, but that’s OK. What I was pointing out is that she was indeed referring to Science News (and also Science Perspectives) as sources for her reading and understanding of a paper.
If I'm interpreting it right, no, it's not the same argument. It sounds like she said she basically checks if it's been talked about in Science besides as an existing paper. Seems reasonably for a publication to consider it's own standards of publishing as good enough.
Science reporters are probably, hopefully, scientifically literate.
