In my opinion the VAST majority of people never fact check, and most of the remaining people don't fact check unless the reporter's views strongly conflict with their own. In the current case being discussed, some embarrassment, and probably some figurative spanking are the aftermath.

In other more serious cases (crime, armed conflict, group terrorism, state terrorism) the aftermath of such a pattern is much more dramatic.

The hard truth is that media outlets need money to survive, to get that money they do two things: publish News/views that won't upset people paying for ads; and publish scoops that sell. No one is going to read a magazine or news "paper" that is broke.

But the hard question is: how do you effectively encourage properly done objective journalism? Is there a Reddit style karma scheme for news outlets? I imagine this will be effective if taken into account as an SEO signal.