The problem for journalists is that they have to write about things that they do not know and frequently do not understand. They don't have a choice but to rely on experts - real or fake - and they usually don't have budget or stuff to check them - because for that you'd need to hire another set of experts! So unless the journalist works for some publication that is obsessive with fact checking (I've heard New Yorker is like that) and has budget to do it, they are at the mercy of the sources. So when you read some random quote in the press, the first instinct should not be "it's true because New York Times says it" but "some guy I don't know said something to some other guy I don't know who probably didn't bother even to verify it".