There are certainly non-Science ways of forming an opinion and deciding policy, in many cases totally legitimate. But once science is claimed, then of course it has to be subject to science rigors.
There are certainly non-Science ways of forming an opinion and deciding policy, in many cases totally legitimate. But once science is claimed, then of course it has to be subject to science rigors.
From the journalism side I think you end up with the problem the wide spread field of journalism has, you have to be read by your audience. That means something with a wider audience is probably going to be more on the ELI5 side which means both the reader and the journalist have to take any reported findings more lightly.
The sliding scale, I believe, comes in with the rigor something is reported. That is both in the practice and the journalistic side. More details can give a more granular understanding showing limitations but some times broad strokes are necessary to get some information out to a wider audience or more quickly.
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.