It would be great if scientific pieces written for a broad audience would be the antidote against mistrust in science. They are not. Nonetheless, we can still learn from popular science.
Popular science has a wonderful motivation: it picks findings people might have spent decades developing and then shares them with everyone without the scientific jargon. This effort aspires to the highest standards of penmanship: only a master of clarity can transform messages that even the best and brightest might struggle with into what someone with a general education can understand.
On the other hand, this effort can eliminate possible misunderstandings that come from non-experts trying to decipher an elaborate message. Especially if the curse of knowledge is at play; i.e., experts often omit details they think are trivial—but only to them.
Without being overly naive, clearly written science roots out false interpretations (to an extent)—as an aspiring scientist, it is especially frightening to see how scientific findings are misinterpreted and even misused to advance specific agendas.
How would you communicate something multiple PhDs have worked on for years? Maybe you follow the advice from the marketing industry:
To get your message across follow this formula used by ad writers everywhere: simplify, simplify, simplify, then exaggerate.—Kevin Kelly
Simple is good. If you can explain it to a child, you are good to go. However, you can oversimplify, and then it is possible to distort science.
Oversimplification is possible even if the findings are kept intact, but details about the method are swept under the rug.
So before acting on the almost perfect correlation between US spending on science, space, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation, ask whether this is too simple to be true.