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Yeah, but many professors aren't tenured. It's not that you're actively misrepresenting the facts; you can only work on what you people will give you money to study. You simply cherry-pick the good set of results, make a nice story, and mention the rest needs further study to cover your back if/when it falls through. Especially when you're starting out as a researcher, money is a problem. Funding is hard to get, 2-3 year grants, and such. If you aren't getting 'results' from the first project it can hard to get anything else funded. You don't get funded, you lose your lab space and your job, and we scientists have kids to feed just like everyone else.
Problem is the system is pretty bad at the moment. You spend a lot of time writing grants, and less time then you should double-checking results. Doing a good statistical analysis can be very counter-productive. The competitive environment makes the peer review process caustic. Reviewers have been known to fail to approve decent papers that contradict their own; or even worse steal the idea and publish their own paper on it later on.
Sorry, I'm a bit cynical about it all at times. There's still a good number of good scientists out there, but their voice often gets drowned out. Spending 4 years producing one quality paper doesn't lead to the same amount of funding as producing 10 bad papers in the same time frame.
That may be true for certain disciplines/teams, but most don't have that problem. Many researchers pay out of their own pocket for research that personally interests them, and many have no significant costs at all in the first place, either because the costs are minimal to begin with, or the university already owns the necessary equipment/facilities, or they can co-author with a program that does. If you want to do a big study, that's a different matter, and I absolutely agree that the system needs to better accommodate quality over quantity, but that's usually the researcher's choice. If nothing else, you can go to a smaller school where the research requirements are much less strict. It's usually the researcher's prerogative to be in that kind of situation whether they have tenure or not.
And not that those others aren't legitimate problems, but they're certainly not the norm either.
