Earlier quoted context omitted.
The gist of this article was not that the original report was "something fake" the scientist "cooked up". It was that the scientist received funding from an interested party that he failed to disclose. While it is true that in the realm of pure logical discourse this fact is irrelevant to the argumentative structure of the original paper, in the real world it is a significant fact that legitimately questions the cred…
The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability. For example, suppose my thesis is, "Running the Miller-Rabin test with a=2 is sufficient to determine primality for all numbers up to 2047." If my argument is, "I have verified this myself", then my argument depe…
Unless you personally have invested the time and effort needed to evaluate his research, you're stuck listening to the people who have. And unless they're all saying the same thing, you have to look at credentials, reputation, and motivation to decide who to believe. While these factors don't affect the quality of his thesis, they do affect it's believability to the rest of us.
In the real world.