https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
As such, this would seem to be a common occurrence and Science would have to decide whether to devote equal attention to every failed reproduction.
I think the answer to this is a rather blatant “of course!”
If Science has the time to support false studies that retrograde the scientific cause, it certainly has the time to publish their corrections and refutations. The scientific process is not about how much stuff you can publish, it's about how much true information you can convey. A journal half the size of Science but twice as trustworthy is at least as valuable, if not vastly more.
It's not as blatant as you think. It takes experienced scientists to review submitted papers, and their time is an expensive resource. Is it interesting that a research team with a sloppy adherence to a methodology failed to replicate a study? Not really. Should Science give resources and a platform to people who are just careless researchers? Obviously not. It's easy to fail to replicate an experiment; just do a bad job.
Considering the reproducibility crisis, is it your position that people are worse at reproducing research than they are at conducting it? An alternative interpretation would be that people have more incentive to publish hastily-made "failed to reproduce" papers than they have "findings" papers, but I don't think that's the case either, especially considering the reply from Science to this case.
Not to every failed reproduction. Only to failures to reproduce results that Science had previously published. And if that means they end up publishing a lot of failures to reproduce, then perhaps they need to re-think their criteria for publishing the original results. After all, why do you think this "reproducibility crisis" exists in the first place?
The only reason this is generating clicks is the politics angle. This is boring science. The original study was probably bad (as, let's face it, most psychology studies are), but they ran it anyway (because clicks). Now the other side gets its clicks on the "censorship" angle.
The science? Still boring.
I don’t understand the distinction you are making here. Why would it be insane to publish refutations? In this case, they refused to even review the refutation.
It's not at all insane to publish refutations. A really good refutation of a long-accepted result is great science, and this kind of thing makes news and runs in major journals all the time.
It's insane to demand that Science publish a refutation of anything they happened to run in the past just because your results (or, let's be honest here, your personal politics) disagree. Most refutations, too, are bad science!
The demand seems to be that "If Science ran an article they're obligated to publish anyone's refutation of that article". And that's insane. It only seems sane to you because your political outrage glands demand justice for someone using the previous study as spin, but that's not Science's problem, and it shouldn't be. Go run the outrage pieces on Slate, that's what it's for.
I did not get the sense that the refutation was seriously considered, and my impression is that the original article has not been retracted in any way, correct? So Science's public stance could be seen as the original article is still the best truth they've published on the topic, which feels wrong.
Wiggle room may be appropriate if the article is already retracted or has already been refuted.
But what is up with this "moral obligation" nonsense? Being wrong isn't "immoral", it's just a mistake.
You're trying to apply ideas of politics and rhetoric to argue that Science somehow "advocated" for a result that made democrats look good and republicans look bad, and that they're now "obligated" to make democrats look bad too. And that's wrong. Like I said if you want political argument fodder go to Slate (or, sadly, HN). That's not what Science does.
Being wrong is not immoral. Being wrong, telling bunches of people the wrong information, and then making no effort to fix your mistake once you have the chance is at least dubious on my personal moral spectrum.