Science Communication on the Rise?

Why is the burden necessarily on the scientists? C.P. Snow said it best: (link)

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question - such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? - not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

The following quotation from the article is the nub of the matter.

"With today's technology, finding information should be a snap, but the real stuff is often bogged down between big chunks of misinformation."

Anyone can post something whether it is credible or not and it starts getting passed around as being true. Some good examples of that are the; carbon footprint/credit hoax, manmade/caused global warming/climate change; evolution, fracking problems, energy scarceity, etc. The list could go on.

There is a statement that goes like this, "tell a lie long enough and pretty soon people start believing it as the truth. The same also goes for certain people who somehow get in the "limelight" through political and financial backing and they become "experts" in some field, eventhough they aren't qualified to speak as such.

Be careful who we listen to and the credibility we ascribe to them.