It seems very dangerous to me to call something a failed experiment because people are too stubborn to learn the lesson from it. Couldn't you apply that logic to scientific outreach concerning vaccinations or climate change? There's a reason there's a documentary called An Inconvenent Truth.
Well I wasn't intentionally trying to frame it in the context of actual experiments or science, but if you want to think of it that way.... it would be pretty atypical for the framers of an experiment to respond to an unexpectedly bad/distracted/statistically non-useful outcome with "WELL. It must be the people that are flawed!" instead of "Let's redesign the experiment and try again". Atmospheric CO2 is at 402.80 ppm.
But the experiment itself is a bad analogy. The experiment has been done, now we're trying to share the results with the non-scientist public. Certainly it's important to discern more or less effective ways of doing that communication, but it doesn't affect the result of the experiment.