Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll

In the early 90s there was an incident that happened to my house that ended up in the local news. The details reported in the news seemed like they were totally made up from someone who happened to be driving by and then told someone else what they thought might have happened. They reported the house was vacant rather than interviewing my family or the other tenants of the not at all vacant 6 family house! We were home the whole time! We didn't see a single reporter or news station even do a drive by of the house before running the story. They would not even have had to knock to ask us what happened - we were outside cleaning up for most of the day as the incident caused a huge mess.

It shocked me that such little effort was made to actually find out what happened before reporting it as fact to the public.

I actually think that they would be less likely to do that today with social media.

I was once a member of a canyoning trip that had a bunch of young teenagers on it (13 - 15 years old). We encountered horrendous weather on the climb out of the canyon and decided to spend the night in an overhanging shelter rather than continue to climb the 300+ meters of cliff face in torrential rain.

The next day we successfully (and safely) made it back to the campsite from which we'd started only to be met with reporters and cameras looking for the story. Basically, they wanted some quote, from somebody, that they could use to pin-point the delay onto a single person, and exaggerate the danger that we were in. The fact was that we decided to take the least risky option in the face of unpredictable, extreme weather. The reporters didn't think this was enough and there was a multi-week long witch-hunt to try to blame it on trip leaders, despite the fact that no-one was harmed (if we'd chosen to continue the climb out in the horrible conditions we faced, then someone would have very likely been harmed).

This was my eye-opener to how the media operate. Instead of "Group of young adventurers safe from freak storm" it became "Irresponsible trip leaders cause near-death of youths".

If it won't sell, it's not news.

(For example, one reporter called it a "warehouse", when you could see it was an office building.)