You can actually see this much more clearly if you live in a non-English speaking country. The journalist community just doesn't seem to fact check very frequently. Many times I see stories being printed about things in Japan which are just wrong. Wire services like Reuters or AP print something and it seems to be taken as gospel. Then other news outlets like BBC seem to run the story without actually checking anything. Quite often it seems to be that the original story just had a bad translation. I've seen Reuters, especially, cock up quotes really badly to the point where a statement like, "We have no option but to continue this policy" would get translated to "We will not continue this policy". However, sometimes this gets blown up to almost fraud levels. A good example of this was a year or so after the big earthquake here I saw a report on BBC that several nuclear reactors were going to be restarted imminently, including the one a couple of km down the road from where I live. As I had seen exactly the opposite statement in the Japanese news, I was curious and rode my bike down to the power station and asked them myself. They told me that there was no way they would be restarting any time soon and that, just the opposite, there was talk of shutting it down permanently. After a few weeks, I saw news that the Japanese government was backing out of their plans to restart the power stations and that this was apparently a big scandal. Except that, of course, it wasn't. The power station was not going to restart. There were never any plans to do so. There was never any backing out and there was never any scandal. Somebody somewhere was obviously covering up for their cock up previously and nobody else bothered to check the sources (or was able to since they didn't speak Japanese). (Just in case anybody is wondering, they are now talking of restarting the power station and will almost certainly do so soon).
This kind of thing happens quite a bit more frequently than most people would imagine. Sometimes the error is quite serious. I imagine that it is practically trivial for governments to feed information to journalists and rely on their inability to check facts (for whatever reason). Based on my own experiences, I now personally don't rank the news very much higher in reliability than most other rumours. The more politically charged the topic, the less likely it is to be true, I think.
This kind of thing happens quite a bit more frequently than most people would imagine. Sometimes the error is quite serious. I imagine that it is practically trivial for governments to feed information to journalists and rely on their inability to check facts (for whatever reason). Based on my own experiences, I now personally don't rank the news very much higher in reliability than most other rumours. The more politically charged the topic, the less likely it is to be true, I think.