Part of the problem is intrinsic to the velocity of news in a hyperconnected world. If a breaking story comes out and your paper delays in covering it, it will

Part of the problem is intrinsic to the velocity of news in a hyperconnected world. If a breaking story comes out and your paper delays in covering it, it will lose out to another paper that is quicker to publish. If no other paper has the information yet, then your paper will be inevitably accused of deliberately sitting on the story. It's a no win situation. Even here we see that errors in just one or two stories has led to commenters accusing WaPo of being a worthless propaganda arm. Furthermore, decreasing ad revenue and increasing competition means that newsrooms are financially strapped compared with earlier days. Back then, even big newspapers published just a few print editions a day. But now there's a constant 24-hour news cycle. It's impossible to check every story 100%; nothing would ever get published. So the editor has to settle for a sub-certain level of confirmation, with fewer fact checkers on staff to boot. To a certain extent, it's better to issue the retraction later. You get eyeballs on your page for the initial story, then more attention for the fallout and retraction. I've now clicked on that WaPo article thrice instead of just once -- cha-ching. Obviously too much of that damages the reputation, but there are a number of tremendously successful organizations that unapologetically and routinely dispense fake news and still prosper as a result. People have been successfully conditioned to care less about accuracy and more about "tell me good stuff about my team and bad stuff about the other team."