How a story gets into the paper without anyone checking a word

I watched two things on TV last night, and both rang bells in my head. The first was an old Hercule Poirot film with David Suchet, based on the 1924 Agatha Christie short story “Western Star”.  It contains the lines… Hastings: “I don’t know how they get these stories in the papers.” Poirot: “They make …