Look, to this day there are millions if not billions of people who think Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet and that Howard Dean let out a wild and crazy scream SOLO (i.e., without a crowd cheering and screaming with him as loudly). Why? Because once these myths and myth-understandings get "out there" in the media, hardly any of our "journalists" bother trying to disabuse the public of their false beliefs.

People who believe lies like those are believing them because they want to believe them. And they choose to believe the media outlets which confirm what they want to believe. You can only be "disabused" of false beliefs if you are willing to be.