What I don't understand is, how do these journalists make a living writing stories like that? There must be an appetite out there for misinformation.
After much thought, I have ultimately decided to answer the rhetorical question from an American perspective, since John Plantagenet of England is one of my potentially over 33 million 26th-great-grandfathers, and he likely bears partial responsibility for jerks behaving badly in government. (It's not that King John got off without ever paying. They did make him sign the Magna Carta against his will, and he eventually died of dysentery.)
To wit, how do people make a living these days writing crap?
The brain is designed to write stories. That helps it to navigate through the world. But while statistics don't lie, and liars can figure, stories suffer the same fate.
Those who don't learn from history get the nasty refresher course, so let's do a Reader's Digest version here, in hopes to light a candle in the windy darkness.
In English common law, air and things that came by air traditionally belonged to everyone, (otherwise, monarchs could tax the use of air, with dire consequences for those in need of breathing and short on cash. So when TV and radio came along, and with both air and fluctuations in the electromagnetic field being generally not well comprehended, the law became that the federal government could regulate broadcasts as part of interstate commerce. (Sure, as an ex-paperboy, I realized that papers more literally arrived by air when I threw them on the porch, but people are much more interested in what they feel is right than in science.)
When cable TV arrived, it seemingly traveled by wires, and people were allowed to own wire individually rather than collectively. Ronald Regan, the acting president of millionaires and billionaires, decided to stop enforcing the FCC fairness doctrine. Previously, news was required to be presented in the public interest for stations to get their FCC licenses removed.
Reporting the news truly had been unprofitable. I was just good in a democratic republic for the people to know what was really happening so they could help steer the ship of state. The sponsorship for broadcasting truth (which is often dismal) did not draw great cash flows to station owners. If you believe that everything in the entire cosmos must turn a financial profit or else be sacked, then the truth telling is doomed.
While there is indeed an appetite for misinformation ("Don't tell me the truth, tell be stuff that feeds my predilections!") "journalists" make money these days telling tall tales as infotainment and otherwise, especially if they hang out with those who are shorting TSLA.
I inform you, in the public interests of fairness and transparency, that I have placed "journalists" in quotes in the preceding paragraph because I have a niece who is a journalist in the more honorable sense of the word. I also acknowledge that have personally also made money telling "lies" as a novelist. I just don't pretend that my lies are entirely true. Truth is stranger than fiction.