I wish I could find it now, but I remember an article written by someone who's job it was to be a physics journalist. He spent so much time writing about physics that he could fool others into thinking that he was a physicist himself, despite not having an understanding of how any of those ideas worked.
Maybe you were thinking about this science studies work [0]? Not a journalist, but a sociologist, who became something of an "expert" in gravitational waves.
