I assume they're trying to steal a living from it.
When we only had newspapers there was limited space and so only plausible stuff made it through. There might have been a few lines given over to some of the stronger rumours but little more. Everything was looked over by the editorial staff.
By contrast, there is almost unlimited space available now and it's full of chancers pretending to be journalists.
Their writing style and grammar is often poor, and what editorial control there is is probably all done by bots, and is rudimentary. Nobody has to justify their fairy tales, and of course there is no comeback for peddling completely inaccurate information.
Lazy writers make stuff up, even lazier ones repeat it, and suddenly a gullible public is convinced it's true because it's "all over the internet".
Of course this isn't confined to harmless things like sport - the same process helps to propagate completely baseless conspiracy theories - and then it's a much more sinister animal.
