[soundwave106]

Major news outlets, no. Not so major outlets, sure.

All the Googling I've seen seems to point to a "Santa Monica Observer" as the primary source of this claim. (See the Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/texas-samir-al-hajeed-sam-hyde/ ), Snopes also links to a "Freedom Daily" and there are a couple of other sketchy news websites with this claim.

The Snopes article also mentions that a comedian known for trolling-style pranks (Sam Hyde -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hyde#Hoaxes_and_pranks ) is tangent to these claims. So my best guess is that you are correct, someone treated a trollish tweet or post as actual news.

I'm not sure why bias is brought up all the time in "fake news", because bias is not the same as fake. Nobody should have issues with conservative news that is known for better vetting, even if their bias is strong (your Wall Street Journals, National Review, etc.). Fake is fake whether it comes from the right or the left. It is true that conservative fake news was much more prevalent in the 2016 election (https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf), but "progressive" fake news definitely exists.