Wrong. Merely trying is in-fact incredibly easy to do, but there is no record of Zimbardo taking a single step in that direction. You don't have a case.
You must be joking. In addition to the peer-reviewed papers he published, he gave media interviews, he testified in Congressional hearings, he published an article in the New York Times Magazine, he published a popular book, he made a PBS series, he made all of the study materials publicly available, he was an expert witness in three trials...
It seems to me that the one who doesn't have a case is you.
Because if he did then it would be highly surprising to me that despite having written a popular book it took until a few years ago and a research paper (not a popular book, not media interviews, etc that he gave where he corrected the record) for people to realize that the conclusion they had drawn about the experiment was wrong?
So apparently what he couldn’t achieve through multiple popular media sources was conveyed very rapidly through a research paper?
Really I’m being needlessly kind here. He only changed his tune once called out, and his claims that this was what the experiment was about all along are in direct contrast to his communicated intent from the beginning. What do we call it when you publish something that says A, while knowing A is untrue? Scientific fraud.
How is that supposed to be convincing?
The study itself described what they thought it might be able to demonstrate. The fraud is Zimbardo's. He was pretty clear that he was testing the hypothesis that the guards would become tyrants. He told the guards to become tyrants.
Even if this is true, whose fault is it? Is it Zimbardo's? Or is it all the academics and media hacks who ran with their own mistaken understanding of what the experiment was actually testing, without bothering to check their understanding against what Zimbardo actually published? (Not to mention all the supporting information that he went to great trouble to make publicly available, as he describes in his response.)
> one has to wonder why he never corrected the record
Trying to correct mistaken or intentionally false claims in the media is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Very few scientists have the time or the wherewithal to do this. Zimbardo published several peer-reviewed papers, as he describes in his response; that's the "record". Anyone who takes media descriptions of any scientific research as accurate is kidding themselves.
> its failure to replicate
Zimbardo's response specifically addresses this point (both in discussing the claimed failure to replicate by a British research team, and in describing other research which has replicated the main findings), so I don't think you can just help yourself to this claim.