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I think its quite rare for any hack to "make up" stories. What they do is they look at something which just is how it is & they think "Hmm, if I presented this in a slightly different way our readers would be really interested" & kid themselves they're performing a public service https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/1360172324012445700
Then, crucially, the sub-editor takes the article and sensationalises it to the max, to the extent that it tells a different story to the article, and then when anyone complains the journalist says 'well I didn't write the headline.'
We were talking about the chest-feeding story earlier, and it's a perfect example. A health-trust issues a document saying staff can use language which makes their patients more comfortable, using 'chestfeeding' as an example.
Then someone alerts the Sun & it becomes this: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14001587/midwives-chestfeeding-breastfeeding-trans-friendly/
The actual story is 'Midwives are told they can use words like 'chestfeeding' if that makes their patient more comfortable' and the Sun reports 'Midwives are told to use 'chestfeeding' instead of 'breastfeeding.' It's not a fabrication. It's just a bit of a twist.
and of course, what happens next is this:
and then by the time it gets to the Opinion pages of the broadsheets it says this
And nobody, at any stage in the process, has made anything up. They've just given it a tiny little twist. Then another tiny little twist. And then years or decades later we are still hearing from people who are FEWMING because the NHS FORCES midwives to say "chestfeeding"
