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.