[thu2111]

I'm not sure there's a penalty. NYT subscriptions have been going up, not down, despite it frequently reporting things that are bizarre or factually wrong. Same is true for many other papers.

That makes sense: people often buy newspapers for the analysis that reconfirms their own world views, and gives them intellectual ammo for their pre-conceived notions.

With citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) they start out with no pre-existing reputation so tend to depend on other ways to quickly build credibility, like using lots of hyperlinks to sources so you can check their claims, or leaving comments open so commenters can criticise and respond. Even today in 2020 it's standard for news articles to provide no citations or hyperlinks at all, even when e.g. the entire report is about a research paper, and often comment sections are now closed. Exactly because so many commenters would often point out flaws in the articles!