Most of the MSM has been nothing but a propaganda machine churning out baseless theories as though they are facts for a pretty long time. People who actually pay attention just tend to call them "lies" for short. Like for example the baseless conspiracy theory that Trump was secretly giving Putin sensitive information because Putin was somehow vaguely controlling Trump. They just never followed up with specifying what information or how Putin was controlling Trump or any details whatsoever. This sort of shit is normal for the MSM. So then you get smaller media / news outlets thinking hey we can also run some baseless sensationalist narratives too and maybe get our ratings up, and then they go with something that they believe is both baseless and sensationalist, and it may or may not actually be baseless, so you get the occasional ironic accidental coverage of a real concern that they thought was just some entertaining nutter material. You can tell when this happens because the random NPC hosts on the show are not at all nervous about retaliation from TPTB since they don't think any of it's real anyway.