I think there are two meanings of "distraction" here. The first, more "serious" meaning that the media probably uses is in the more generic sense of "something which distracts people." The second one, and one that a lot of people in the "AI ethics" community like to use, is a sense in which this was deliberately thought up as a diversion by tech companies to distract the public from their own misconduct.

A problem I see is people equivocating between these two meanings, and thus inadvertently arguing against the media's weird steel-man version of the AI ethicists' core arguments, instead of the real arguments they are making.

Don't really think there is any; in fact, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary, from the polls I've seen.

Last I checked, the whole point of the Overton window is that you can only shift it by advocating for ideas outside of it.

Would be interested in seeing the cause of the general problem here, and some possible solutions.

I amend my previous comment to replace the phrase "seriously considered" with "considered." Also, there are many state laws against human reproductive cloning, but many states have no such laws: 

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/appendix-state-laws-on-human-cloning

I think that it's good that this proposal was seriously considered. I don't think it currently beats other megaprojects on impact/solvability/neglectedness, especially since quite a bit of genetic engineering research is already legal in the US (I am once again reminding everyone that human reproductive cloning is legal in many US states, and that it seems unlikely for blue states to enact new laws against reproductive autonomy in a post-Roe era). However, I think that it's good that this proposal was seriously considered, and there should be, on the margin, more proposals like it (in terms of large scale, outside-the-box thinking, potential "weirdness," etc.)

Last I checked, Tetlock's result on the efficacy of superforecasters vs. domain experts wasn't apples-to-apples: it was comparing individual domain expert forecasts vs. superforecaster forecasts that had been aggregated.

Do they really control the narrative in the "mainstream media," though, or just a few far-left content mills that tend to get clicks by being really outrageous?