And how many of these will cover the retraction? A dozen at most? And all those articles will be sitting out there, getting cited and read on occasion.
This case is interesting because there's a large population who would find these (unproven as it turns out) results confirmatory rather than unexpected.
In the end they were neither.
The history of science is full of drama where most issues took multiple generations to resolve. It's easy to forget, in those interim periods, people would build all kinds of castles on total BS all the time that cost society in so many ways.
Today stuff gets resolved faster and that's a good thing. People, qualified or not, who get carried away by hype or bias look foolish much much faster. And thanks to how hard it is to erase mistakes from the internet good luck rebuilding lost cred.
Study Shows Non-Religious Kids Are More Altruistic and Generous Than Non-Religious Ones (TIME)
Religious children more punitive, less likely to display altruism (Boing Boing)
Study: Religious children less altruistic, more mean than nonreligious kids (Chicago Sun-Times)
Religious Kids Aren’t as Good at Sharing, Study Finds (Yahoo Parenting)
Study: Religion Makes Children Less Generous (Newser)
Religion doesn’t make kids more generous or altruistic, study finds (LA Times)
Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts, study finds (The Guardian)
Being religious makes you less generous, study finds (metro.co.uk)
Kinder Without God: Kids Who Grow Up In A Religious Home Less Altruistic Than Those Without Religion (Medical Daily)
Surprise! Science proves kids with religious upbringings are less generous — and so are adults (rawstory.com, the Medical Daily story reposted with a new headline)
Why don't reporters get angry about this and demand more and better retractions? This hurts their credibility more than anyone.
False reporting of any sort (including the failure to correct prior false reports, whether intended or not) always causes harm. Truth and principles matter.
Furthermore, reducing ideas to power struggles between those who speak them is to commit both the genetic fallacy and the ad-hominem fallacy.
Because ideas are the substrate of thought, belief, motivation, desire, and human life itself. Without ideas we lack the ability to understand anything at all.
Because it is true, or someone believes it to be so.
Because it carries explanatory power - something we all strongly desire.
You might call those reasons “purposes” - if so, I don’t disagree. But the truth or falsehood of an idea transcends any “purpose” someone may have for speaking it. This is the academic posture: to dispassionately evaluate truth claims without fearing the speaker.
That doesn't stop us from acknowledging the fact that ideas and worldviews have strong ties and are intermingled enough that they almost always warrant an underlying motivation whether that be a noble search for truth or a way of digging further into denial.
"Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'" (Luke 16:31)
It may be true that reading about the study would not have convinced anyone to become a practicing Christian. But there were undoubtedly people who were on the fence about going back to church, either for themselves or for their kids, who decided not to based on the purported conclusion that it made kids less generous. So just because the study alone might not have convinced anyone to follow Christ, there still might be more practicing Christians if the study had been done correctly (and therefore garnered very little coverage) or if the correction had been covered as widely as the original flawed study.