Never mind the massive debate that occurs within the scientific community itself on some new or controversial claims. When the press gets its hands on the views

Never mind the massive debate that occurs within the scientific community itself on some new or controversial claims. When the press gets its hands on the views of one dissenter and one proponent, it makes it seem like there are only sides A and B. This is not as simplistic as politics, where politicians form into immutable groups Left vs Right. We are dealing with numerous camps, and within each scientific camp, there are numerous arguments made for/against an issue. Take climate change, no doubt a controversial issue. To say it is "controversial" in the political sense would mean Left and Right (in the USA alone) have vociferously different stances on the issue. However, if viewed as a scientific controversy, we are now talking about detailed methodological concerns, like methods of data collection, analysis, kinds of statistical bias, and subtle changes in arbitrary parameters. Any scientist can tweak this or that in their model to make it conform more easily to their preconceived notions about climate change. Unfortunately, we also have some oil industry shills out there who got trotted out as an equally weighted side B to the side A of the dozens of scientists who would generally disagree. Then, you also have anti-science proponents who use the legitimate self-criticism of scientists to attack science as a whole. It's a sad state of affairs. Science should be reported in the press, but it should also be reported much better than it is. In the USA in particular, STEM education is lagging behind: the average person can't delineate the good science coverage from the bad, and we have ridiculous notions and conspiracies that fail to become filtered out (anti vax, climate change deniers, flat earthers, moon landing was faked, etc.) For me, reproducibility is one problem in a broader ecosystem of scientific problems, including science education generally, as well as misuse of statistics, and a saddening drive for incremental results at the expense of more broad-based thinking which might lead to fundamental breakthroughs. Our education systems must be reformed to deal with these problems, that's the only way out that I see.