onfocus

"In the piece, Fuller recounts a time in 2016 he saw a man grab “a handful of beef jerky” and walk out of a Walgreens. Based on this five-year-old anecdote and a statement from Walgreens, Fuller declared a “shoplifting epidemic” and called into question a sentencing-reform measure that reduced some thefts from felonies to misdemeanors. The piece, notably, does not include any data on crime rates in San Francisco."

The media wrote dozens of stories about a retail theft epidemic but it wasn’t based on reality. Why does the media choose to write about some topics frequently based on hearsay? Why aren’t there consequences or retractions with the same volume?