In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.

Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:

One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.

[0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...

Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.

Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.

In contrast, computer science is very close to math and should be more verifiable, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in physics, a lot of materials science breakthroughs are suspect.

  If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science 
  If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science
  If it has the word "science", it's not

I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out.

Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete.

The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.

It's not that outrage or unfounded opinions were new, or the masses were never fooled or taken advantage of before. It's that the mechanism for social consensus is rapidly shifting.

> I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.

And yet the consensus about climate change and in particular support for policies that address it is very strong.

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...

60-70% is far far higher than most politicians win elections by. They'll call 5low-something% a landslide. They push policies and laws that are far less popular than that, claiming popular mandate.

And yet there are a bunch of people fixated on the idea that it is a disadvantaged (poorer, less educated) minority of average citizens of the country who are orchestrating some evil battle against it. Rather than seeing the obvious that the ruling class is as always pushing divide and conquer techniques, shifting blame, and turning people on one another. A good example of the emotional mechanism of social consensus.