I used to be in the NLP group of a good school on the east coast. I was trying to reproduce an algorithm from a paper that won Best Paper from a good school on the west coast. A postdoc from that school said, "oh stay away from that algorithm. they basically cooked the results of that whole paper by cherry picking data. it doesn't really work at all".
At that point I dropped it and never thought about it again -- there is no career value for a phd student (the engine room of research) in "outing" bad research. I was just trying to get some baselines to compare my own work against. On the flip side, getting best paper award at a top conference is the kind of thing that sets you up for faculty interviews at you choice of university.
All that said, academia and the scientific process tend to work well, in aggregate and over time. I think a lot of times people with juicy or disgruntled stories speak more and get remembered more, and it casts academia in far more negative a light than reality. Most of the time, science works well.. just in a way that doesn't produce stories worth posting to boards like HN. So that's my counterbalance.