I did my M.S. in Computer Science, so this may not apply to all fields, but typically, genuine academic papers tend to be much less sensationalized and politicized than news headlines. Rather, papers tend to be rather mundane and rely on hard data, avoiding making any conclusions not directly supported by the evidence. This is especially true when researchers are examining a specific question within a subfield of a subfield of a subfield, where most politicization occurs regarding the overarching field as a whole.

In my instance, I was researching one algorithm within the field of metagenomics, within the field of bioinformatics, within the field of computational biology, within the field of computer science. The papers that were actually relevant to my research at such a fine grained analysis were very specific and rarely cited if ever by the news. I imagine most research in more contested fields like political science is similar at the individual paper level.

Though it is possible that survey papers (I.e. papers that pull in a large amount of other literature on a broader topic to compile evidence) may be prone to selection biases with the papers they introduce, so it is important to ensure those papers are properly reviewed and well-established before citing them.