Great post!
Ironically, I believe a big part of this mistrust in science and scientists has its roots precisely in insufficient, deficient and unsuccessful science communication.
I fully agree with this. Many scientists are very bad communicators, for this or that reason. However, most young people are however very well aware of that and are making a lot of effort in communicating better.
Also, on different grounds and to come back to the topic, many people just partially ignore data to "prove" somehow "their" theories. Then usually follow ad hominem attacks and so on.
However, when talking to someone who is not deep into our topic, or not familiar with it at all, we are confronted with big picture style of observations and questions that we might have overlooked by making assumptions instead.
In several of my posts, I actually fell this... I am just so excited with respect to what I talk about ... that I forget to stay connected to Earth, somehow.
It is also an educational issue. For example, I was shocked to find out that some students here in Germany are already in the second year of their PhD and haven't presented their work publicly (in a conference, for example) even once!
Also, in conferences I've attended there is a very clear tendency: the Americans are usually good, engaging speakers (since their curriculum provides them with more opportunities to learn how to communicate their science, generous travel stipends, teaching requirements, etc), while everyone else is kind of hit-and-miss (lets not even talk about strong accents making the talk unintelligible!).
So sad, but so true. Sometimes even when you read the papers, if they cannot hide the evidence or an experiment didn't quite go the way they wanted, in the text description they just pretend that it did (and then you look at the figure and are like, are we looking at the same thing?), haha... I've seen this a few times.
This is really not acceptable. A student should go once a year to an international conference, if money is there of course, and present at least at national workshops.