Cold fusion is a bit more complicated than that. The early experiments were certainly flawed, and there were way to many people announcing results for publicity before they had checked their work.

After a few years, it was no longer socially acceptable for respected scientists to work on cold fusion. It didn't matter anymore how good your reputation was as a researcher, or how carefully designed your experiment was--if your research was in cold fusion, it would get largely ignored.

Unfortunately, this happened around the time a couple groups of respected researchers with good experiment design were getting interesting results pointing to real new phenomena, and perhaps explaining why prior results had been so erratic.

David Goodstein around this time wrote a great article [1] looking back at cold fusion, which included a discussion of these later results, and how socially science had reached a state where they could not be considered. Here are the last few paragraphs.

    All of this was much less important than the fact
    that Cold Fusion experiments, if they gave positive
    results at all, gave them only sporadically and
    unpredictably. When Bednorz and Mueller announced
    the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity
    in 1986, no one carped about control experiments,
    because, once the recipe was known, any competent
    scientist could make a sample and test it and it
    would work immediately. If, at their press
    conference, Pons and Fleischmann had given a
    dependable recipe for producing excess heat, they
    very likely would be Nobel Prizewinners now (as
    Bednorz and Mueller are) rather than social outcasts
    from the community of scientists. The essential key
    to the return of Cold Fusion to scientific
    respectability is to find the missing ingredient
    that would make the recipe work every time.

    Experiments done in the U.S. and in Japan, and
    reported at the Maui meeting indicate that the
    missing ingredient may have been found. In all the
    various Cold Fusion experiments, the first step is
    to load deuterium into the body of metallic
    palladium. The issue is how much deuterium gets into
    the metal. The ratio of the number of atoms of
    deuterium in the metal to the number of atoms of
    palladium is called x. It turns out, by means of
    electrolysis, or by putting the metal in deuterium
    gas, that it is rather easy to get x up to the range
    of about 0.6 or 0.7. That is already a startlingly
    high figure. If there are almost as many deuterium
    atoms as palladium atoms in the material, the
    density of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) is
    essentially equal to that of liquid hydrogen rocket
    fuel, which can ordinarily exist only at extreme low
    temperatures. In other words, palladium (and certain
    other metals including titanium) soak up almost
    unbelievable amounts of hydrogen or deuterium if
    given the chance. This is far from a new discovery.
    However, according to the experiments reported at
    Maui, x=0.6 or 0.7 is not enough to produce Cold
    Fusion. Both the American and Japanese groups showed
    data indicating there is a sharp threshold at
    x=0.85. Below that value (which can only be reached
    with great difficulty and under favorable
    circumstances) excess heat is never observed. But,
    once x gets above that value, excess heat is
    essentially always observed, according to the
    reports presented at Maui, and recounted by Franco
    Scaramuzzi in his seminar at the University of Rome.

    The audience at Rome, certainly the senior
    professors who were present, listened politely, but
    they did not hear what Franco was saying (that much
    became clear from the questions that were asked at
    the end of the seminar, and comments that were made
    afterward). If they went away with any lasting
    impression at all, it was just the sad realization
    that a fine scientist like Franco had not yet given
    up his obsession with Cold Fusion. They cannot be
    blamed. Any other audience of mainstream scientists
    would have reacted exactly the same way. If Cold
    Fusion ever gains back the scientific respectability
    that was squandered in March and April of 1989, it
    will be the result of a long, difficult battle that
    has barely begun.

    Recently, I told this story in a Philosophy course
    we teach at Caltech called "Ethics of Research." The
    first question, when I finished my tale, was, do I
    believe in Cold Fusion? The answer is, no.
    Certainly, I believe quite firmly the theoretical
    arguments that say Cold Fusion is impossible. On the
    other hand, however, I believe equally firmly in the
    integrity and competence of Franco Scaramuzzi and
    his group of co-workers at Frascati. I was disturbed
    when I saw that Franco had gotten caught in the web
    of science-by-news conference in April 1989
    (although I was truly pleased that he finally got
    the long overdue recognition his agency ENEA owed
    him), and I was even more distressed when I learned
    that Franco and his group had observed excess heat
    (the "bad kind" of Cold Fusion). However, I have
    looked at their cells, and looked at their data, and
    it's all pretty impressive. The Japanese experiment
    showing that heat nearly always results when x is
    greater than 0.85 looks even more impressive on
    paper. It seems a particularly elegant, well
    designed experiment, at least to the untutored eye
    of a physicist (what do I know about
    electrochemistry?) What all these experiments really
    need is critical examination by accomplished rivals
    intent on proving them wrong. That is part of the
    normal functioning of science. Unfortunately, in
    this area, science is not functioning normally.
    There is nobody out there listening.

    I suppose that, if nuclear fusion really does take
    place whenever x is greater than 0.85 in palladium,
    the world of conventional science will eventually be
    forced to take notice. If not, then the whole story
    I have told you is nothing but a curious footnote to
    a bizarre and ugly episode in the history of
    science. Either way, I think the story illuminates
    the inner dynamics of the scientific enterprise in a
    way that few other stories have done. For that
    reason alone, it may be worth telling.

[1] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html

That was taken very seriously at the time. I went to a well-attended talk at Stanford by a Stanford physicist who was trying to replicate the Pons/Fleischman experiment. When they first set up the apparatus, they had radiation detectors with alarms, in case it started generating a dangerous level of neutrons. After some initial tests where not much happened, they moved the radiation alarm gear back a bit.

Total measured neutron output, best case, appeared to be twice background. That's small enough that people moving around (people are mostly water) was enough to cause such variation. So they moved the experiment to a "neutron cube", a big box built of lead bricks where few background neutrons penetrated. Then there was no significant difference in neutron levels between "off" and "on".

They also tried heat generation measurement. Because you have to put power into the Pons/Fleischman apparatus to get anything to happen (it's not self-sustaining) it's a difficult experiment to do accurately. It requires water jackets, insulation, and lots of measurements. They were unable to detect any heat output above measurement noise.