Suspect industry funding is a problem in some fields, but the powers that be couldn't care less about the charge of the electron, and yet it took twenty years to correct a fairly trivial error in Millikan's original measurement.
Correct, but you are missing a wrinkle. What if I disingeniously call people cranks? What if a lot of actual experts in one camp call actual experts of the other camp cranks?
In the hard sciences we can deal with it. If one camp can build working satellites and the other cannot we know who the real deal is. But in softer sciences? It's an unsolved problem as far as I can tell.
Whether their reasons are benevolent or not, the existence of these people is the rule in science. If the knowledge moves too far forward, or away from their expertise they lose their relevance, and so they have incentive to protect it. This leads to biases in scientific research that are politically difficult to overcome.
Science advances one funeral at a time. -Max Planck
Well, this is kind of the point of peer review, isn't it? You review the work, you reject it if it doesn't pass muster.
More seriously, there are organized efforts by well-funded groups whose purpose is to sow doubt about science that could hurt their profits. The fossil fuels lobby is the best example, but the alcohol, sugar, and various polluter lobbies are out there too. They fund scientists who will do research designed from the outset to be favorable to the funders.
Faced with an organized bad-faith effort to corrupt the scientific endeavor, journal editors and grant reviewers naturally start applying more scrutiny to anything on the "wrong" side. Then the lobbyists complain about "preapproved narratives" in the Wall Street Journal.