The world s autocratic countries (russia china turkey etc) don’t rely on fabricated news, they rely on hiding the truth and placing a biased spin on it. They know that outright lies will actually harm their image.
And killing journalists, and imprisoning political opponents, and controlling the media and, yes, straight up lying, because no other voice can be heard, so it's impossible to publicly fact check their lies.
That's a few autocratic countries. Such a statement is obviously not true in general. For starters you have dictatorships which have been based upon absurd and shameless lies. North Korea currently, Haiti under Papa Doc, Turkmenistan under Niyazov. In addition I'd imagine hiding news is the first line of defense, but if that fails none of these autocratic governments are not above lying (and I'd bet you find the dictators of those countries have lied many times when it suited them, if evidence is available).