Just a general thought:
This is clearly true about me as well. I don't think that's necessarily a flaw unique to myself; I think a lot of people probably don't care about stuff that has direct significance to their life - or, at least, a symbol of something of significance in their life. Hence this shirt becomes a big deal. Nobody lands on a comet every day, but they do experience casual sexism.
What does that mean for science? I'm not sure. Is it really necessary for this stuff to be publicly popular? Obviously everyone wants their efforts to be recognised, but does it matter that the public don't follow science closely?
From a journalistic perspective, I think most science journalism is a waste of time and resources. The public interest, after all is: what I need to know to live happily. You have to know all sorts of complicated things about government to make an informed vote, because otherwise we have a distorted political system. If we have a broken political system, you can't live happily. Almost all journalism is not in the public interest, including all crime journalism, all sports journalism, ect.
So, why do we think science should be in the headlines? I have an emotional, intuitive support for that view, but no actual reason for it. Can anyone give me a good argument?
There's the obvious "people enjoy hearing about new science" angle, but that's more entertainment than public interest. One could argue that's the actual reason science is in the news, and everything else is post-hoc rationalizations for newspapers to include stuff that sells.
Regardless, there are a number of public interest reasons.
1) Exciting new science is a big draw for science popularization, and science popularization is how you get people interested in becoming scientists, which are big plus to civilization (but adjust for my obvious bias here).
2) People having at least some knowledge of what scientists are working on helps bridge the gap between academia and society. The more approachable science seems, the more likely people are to take it into account.
3) Some science has direct relevance to decision-making, e.g. global climate change. Some science has indirect relevance, e.g. knowing what NASA is doing can help you evaluate whether we might want to cut or increase its budget.
4) It would be pretty fucking sad for the average person in a technologically advanced society to have no idea what their society is capable of, be it genetic engineering or space travel or analysing brains with an fMRI. I admit "it would be sad" is not an argument, but going with instinct here, I suspect there are relevant effects from the average non-scientist knowing at least where the cutting edge of science is roughly located. Even if it is just to be able to tell at a glance whether some proposal is currently impossible or not.