> I mean, how many media entities said Iraq had WMD before the war? Most of them?
You're conflating two different categories of error. In the case of Iraq WMD, the claims were attributed to the government agencies making them and most stories noted when experts (e.g. the UN inspectors, French intelligence, etc.) either disagreed or simply pointed out the lack of corroborating evidence. Additionally, all of the credible media published followups and corrections over time.
What we've been seeing a lot more lately are National Enquirer-style complete fabrications where no detail in the story is backed up by a verifiable source and nothing will be retracted, no matter how flagrantly wrong.
Google could stop the latter by flagging sites which don't cite real sources or retract known fabrications. That doesn't mean that they need to be the content police – a site which wants to say policy X is terrible could still run op-eds or simply quote real people (“Sen. X says other party's plan will …”).
You're conflating two different categories of error. In the case of Iraq WMD, the claims were attributed to the government agencies making them and most stories noted when experts (e.g. the UN inspectors, French intelligence, etc.) either disagreed or simply pointed out the lack of corroborating evidence. Additionally, all of the credible media published followups and corrections over time.
What we've been seeing a lot more lately are National Enquirer-style complete fabrications where no detail in the story is backed up by a verifiable source and nothing will be retracted, no matter how flagrantly wrong.
Google could stop the latter by flagging sites which don't cite real sources or retract known fabrications. That doesn't mean that they need to be the content police – a site which wants to say policy X is terrible could still run op-eds or simply quote real people (“Sen. X says other party's plan will …”).