Michael LaCour, the UCLA graduate student at the center of a bizarre "science" scandal - we'd do science a real favor if we stopped calling political science and sociology science, even if they get published in Science - apparently made up data in a different study about political bias in the media. The one that got people looking into his other work was his claim that if we just talked to each other, people would change their minds. It was a delight for the truly gullible and cultural activists and it made political science feel relevant.

But once that was shown to be a little too perfect to be real the knives came out. While science academia is liberal, and academic political science is really, really liberal, peer review is viciously conservative. So people began looking at his other results with the skepticism no one ever bothered to show before. 

Another very popular counter-intuitive study, which was frequently cited at conferences, found that people don’t have a biased media diet, which had to be a disappointment to the social sciences contingent insisting that Republicans are born that way and are hard-wired to watch Fox News.

Virginia Hughes at Buzzfeed discusses Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin, who published a report showing it looks like LaCour fudged data in his media diet paper to make it look much cleaner.  And some listed sources were not sources. 

Sorry, political science fans who hoped this was legit, 94 percent of Americans are still in the bag for a political party and frame their issues through that filter, just like we always thought.