alt Hacker NewsI think a lot of studies are actually illegitimate. I think scientists all admit this, which is why peer-review, disclosing conflicts of interest, sharing your data, reporting all your measures BEFORE you collect data, not lying with statistics, etc are all being asked for (and often not done). This is why scientists often weight for meta-studies and replication before trusting any finding.
Laymen also correctly have an intuition that the people doing these studies aren't entirely trustworthy. What they don't have is a clear picture of how much work goes into these studies, who's doing it, what their motivations are, etc.
In my opinion studies when they can, should record videos of all data and make it publicly available online. Watching somebody do 1,000 hours of research is more proof-of-work to lay-people than some semi-coherent summary-for-a-layperson article.
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Laymen have been trained to be reflexively distrustful of everything because there's more profit and power in weaponizing fear and cynicism.
When a political party controls the science, you end up with say, Trump pushing one set of results, and Biden pushing another. It then becomes either pick the science that agrees with your politics, or throw up your hands in frustration. The average reader probably won't be able to dig into the fundamentals of the research and pull out the salient results, nor are they guaranteed it isn't policy pushed through overstated claims. It really undermines good science. It also falls back on the researchers who push science based on politics as well, so it isn't just the politicians.