The distinction between the social sciences and the hard sciences is another problem. The average joe likely thinks of both arenas as basically being "science", and this lack of distinction is greatly exacerbated by certain people in the social sciences who make it a point to define their field as scientific (for the purposes of self-adulation). The fact of the matter is that the so-called social sciences are at present not sciences at all in the meaning of the scientific method. Sure, they do studies, make hypotheses and weigh the results, but since science is nothing if not methodology then we can identify without much difficulty that any 'science' involving the study of complex human interactions cannot possibly have a rigorous enough (or even necessarily coherent at all) methodology to qualify as science. Right now it's more like statistics, if anything.
This is, to be sure, debatable, but we can in any case make a blatant distinction between social psychology and particle physics in terms of which offers hard results and which offers educated opinions. But when anyone studying...well, pretty much anything, calls themselves a "scientist" a layman can hardly be blamed for thinking "scientists" are full of it when an economist says something stupid. The problem is when serious scientists like chemists and physicists make a public claim and their claim is treated as if it was an economist or social psychologist saying it.
But it gets worse, because the word "scientist" is even becoming somewhat dated in media parlance, as now we have "experts" taking their place, which broadens the fields involved even beyond the hard sciences and social sciences and now basically encompasses all fields within the liberal arts. So now we have "leading experts" saying thing as reported in news media, and the statements are trumpeted as if they came from a physics lab after a conclusive result came in. And even in physics it takes years to verify these things.
I agree with LetterRip that the reporting is a big part of the problem, but I think the reason the reporting is happening in this way is largely because of either direct advocacy or indirect memeing advocacy where authors jump on the meme train and start repeating what they hear, even if they aren't directly benefiting from the advocacy.
Without learning a substantial amount about each discipline it's not really believable that an average reader will be able to parse "experts" from "scientists" from "members of a CalTech team." To them it's all academics making claims, and while it's sad that loose studies get lumped in with CERN results in the papers, it's also inevitable that this confusion will ensue when science is the new religion and everyone is already sick of religion.
