Perhaps that's because scientists had abused, the public trust in the not too distant past?

(that includes paper publishes as well authors).

I am interested however to learn/understand opinions of how to make the situation better.

For example, updating insensitive model that would include critical reviews of published work, independent confirmation of published work, and so on.

There could be a bias-adjustment model where if heavy majority of the government or business grants are looking for a particular 'answer' within a given subject-area, there need to be a counter-balance model (that, again, incentivizes a plausible discourse)

Today's intensives model for academia, appears to give lot of weight to # of papers being published.

In the areas where statistical significance of experiments/observations (rather than provable theoretical result) plays an important role -- this particular measure of 'one's academic achievement', could be responsible for the 'trust issues'