Yes, I mostly agree with all you said. But the crucial bit is the last paragraph: it is not a scientist job to do these things. If society required them then it would be useful that Universities and other organisations gave (say) 10-20% free time to the scientist to reply to inquires in the newspapers (or online).

At the moment I see all around me at University people who are working like crazy to write some paper or meet some deadline. These are the metric on which the scientist is judged, and most of all how he/she can preserve his job. Scientist risk being fired like everyone else (well, at least young scientist).

So society has tried to fill this gap with new jobs: the scientific journalist and the writer of popular science books. They are those doing the job you describe. And there is one added advantage. Many scientist can find it difficult to explain things to the layman for the simple reason that they don't quite understand the knowledge gap between them. I've met many good scientist who were terrible lecturers and that is to a classroom full of wanna-be scientist who go good grades and passed exams.

So yes, scientist should be taught at uni how to talk to non-scientist effectively. But I think it's even better to have someone else, who knows the general topic, reads the papers, and writes a big summary in it for the laymen. They can probably do a much better job.

But as this article showed you still get flak, and a lot of it. And not just flak: you may be taken to court! And sometimes this may happen even if you keep your head low, simply because your paper is starting to get good reputation and so other scientist may use it as an argument in their discussions.

One last word: it's kind of tough when you know the topic well and someone who clearly has no idea gives you an argument on why you are wrong. If you give them the benefit of the doubt then they achieved their aim of muddying the water. If you take up the challenge and try to show why he is wrong, you get attacked for using complicated language or concepts that the laymen cannot understand, or simply branded as a stubborn zealot. And metaphors can only take you that far: a lot of the difficult science is completely against common sense so metaphors don't help much.

A couple of times I had to discuss with people about probability. Their argument was the usual fallacy that if you get---say---10 heads in a row then it's more likely to get a tail. They will mention things like "you need to get 50/50 in the long run" or they will make distinctions between short runs and long (statistical) runs. And no matter how much I tried, I couldn't show they were wrong. If I tried to talk of absolute deviations and relative deviation then I would already lose them. And ironically Math is not science: a scientific theory is never 100% right, but proved mathematical theories are (as long as you start from the right axioms). And yet there was no way.

I think you underestimate how easy it is to come up with random explanations or muddy the waters when you are not uphold to the same standards than the scientist.

P.S. That said I personally don't think it's a scientist job to decide about policy changes. I mean, I'd love it if an expert did so, but what society wants is decided by society. Scientist are there to provide the info, not to decide how to use the knowledge.