An interesting article titled "Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog" was posted on ScientificBlogging.

This got me thinking, the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog really isn't a journalistic phenomenon; I think it is much more of a cultural/humanistic phenomenon. We all love to see an underdog proven right. And in fact, that is a good thing, because it means that any prejudice we have, it will be toward the acceptance of new ideas. What is troublesome, however, is the assignment of predetermined outcome preferences to scientific (or political or otherwise) debates. Somehow, our enjoyment of David versus Goliath story gets translated into an automatic preference of the prevalence of the minority opinion.

More than that, it is quite often now-a-days that people play the "I am being oppressed" card, especially with regards to discredited scientific theories. Dr. Roughgarden, as portrayed in the cited article is one, and so is Randall Mills of Hydrino theory, or even the still-ongoing research on so-called antigravity lifters based on the Biefeld-Brown effect.

(Hum, my thoughts are a bit more than disorganized on this. Will get back some time later to re-write this.)