Fabric of our lives...oh...jk it's not fabric. It's plastic.

Fabricating the news is really a concept that is baffling to me.  With how much crazy stuff is really happening to us right now, WHAT is the need to make more of it up?  It seems that in most instances we've studied in class, the stories are all real things that I'm sure have happened to someone, they just haven't done the research to find the person.  So in other words, you could say they are lazy, or just reporting the story backwards.
For a fascinating article on the top 10 most famous "journo fabrications" click here 

It's not only journalists who are making up these facts- take the scandal of James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces, that was almost compeltely fabricated.  Having been suggested on Oprah's reading list, it was a media frenzy when the news broke and brought on an entire new meaning to fabrication, even inspiring a slew of new words to be added to conversation such as knews and Sprinklegate.

So why do it? In nearly every incident the journalist has been fired, and every incident their reputation has been smeared, tattered, esentially destroyed.  With so much riding on your reputation of being fair, honest, balanced, as a journalist, why take the risk of making up facts?

The only possible conclusion I can think of is to cut corners.  Not worth the extra 20 minutes you might gain by making up a fact for a lifetime legacy of being "that guy who completely made up that book- you know, the one with the hand covered in sprinkles on the cover!"