If you run 200 studies trying to show nonsense that protects your industry, and you set a statistical significance level of p>0.05 in seeking statistical correlation, you will find 10 studies that achieve statistical significance without fudging any numbers. Then you will announce that an exhaustive meta-analysis of ten studies supports your contentions about your profitable activity.

You cannot entirely separate intention from the merit of the science. Those 200 studies are an elaborate propaganda campaign, and they always were, each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that they had an internal logic.

Scientists should react with violent disgust and ostracism at clear attempts to attain a specific result without a lot of very explicit framing (eg: pre-announcing, announcing the other 190 studies, having a third party independently replicate the 10, etc), but they can't, because this sort of industrial campaign is funding such a huge percent of scientific research.

The NSF is doling out 9 billion dollars a year to run at least semi-objective science, and if this was 90 billion or 900 billion, things would be quite a bit different, and motivated "research" would not have the same place. We are dramatically over-supplied on researchers, to the point that a lot of them are making sub-minimum wage working as adjuncts, postdocs, "grad students", baristas. We built a system of university research that is the envy of the world, that exports knowledge and culture en masse, and we're not using it for more than 0.03% of GDP because some Congressperson has a poster of researchers "Spent $1.5M studying the mating habits of fruit flies, like some kind of pervert", and because Reagan hated government and wanted Coca-Cola to do our science for us.