Retractions are kind of a bandaid. They should not even be needed if journalists did their due diligence. Worst case I personally saw was a claim by a journalism lecturer that a small news site was alt-right from its inception and wrote a long screed lambasting the site - no, it wasn't, it got sold to a different owner a couple of years after creation because the original owners could not monetize it.

They even got the year of the creation of the site wrong. So, a person teaching journalism didn't even bother running a WHOIS query and spending 2 EUR to run a query against business registry. If that is the level of the teachers, then what can you expect from the people they taught?