I don't doubt Phil Plait - I am aware of his work and blog. I just prefer sources that aren't aligned with TV channels.
And the Scientific American article is not sensationalist in the slightest. Did you even read it? I think it's a more complete piece on the matter, and quotations from the actual team on the Breakthrough Listen itself. Plait doesn't go in as much depth and does not appear to talk to the BL team themselves. This seems like lazy journalism, even from a professional. At least he's got this nugget after his meme, though:
But I'll admit I'm scratching my head. This signal's frequency isn't one generally used by satellites and such. And Proxima is located deep in the southern sky, pretty far from the kinds of orbits you'd expect of satellites that could emit such a signal (though not impossible; two astronomer friends of mine have been speculating over this on Twitter in fact). A slowly moving Earth satellite that happened to be near Proxima in the sky at the time could emit a signal with a shift in frequency, but we'll have to wait and see if the scientists looked into the specifics of that.
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