Nothing hypothetical about it, it's fairly common for even big news publishers like CNN to put out a headline that is so misleading that it's effectively a lie,

Nothing hypothetical about it, it's fairly common for even big news publishers like CNN to put out a headline that is so misleading that it's effectively a lie, and then either never follow up with a correction if the story turns out to be false or put out a much less publicized and still misleading "correction" such that the correction is buried in a few lines in the middle somewhere. If big publishers are doing this often on well known topics, it stands to reason that the much larger number of little publishers are also doing it with at least similar frequency for less well known topics.