To be clear: it is an embarrassing error. Everyone also thinks this. They have been dragged for it quite a bit. But it was not deliberate.
In terms of the “total loss of credibility” … the fraction of empirical papers with some coding error approaches 1. The question is how bad it is.
They did 3 things in that paper. One of them they have called a coding error. Ok.
Two of the 3 were intentional. They intentionally omitted date ranges for some countries. And they weighted countries differently. This they admit to. And they defend.
Yet, nowhere in the manuscript does it say that in order to get these results you must apply weights to the data and you must leave out some inconvenient data points.
I can make up any argument for anything that I feel like if I start to apply weights to the data designed to make my argument work. They failed the most basic of scientific ethical standards.
There is no one in the economics profession who thinks Reinhardt or Rogoff deliberately made that error bc they had something personal at stake in convincing policymakers that austerity policies were the right outcome. Quite unlike the cases of ariely or gino or various others.
They made an embarrassing error but ultimately it was a coding error.