I am doing significant railroad research from the period 1870-1890, and will frequently come across newspaper articles that are mistaken, misleading, or just plain wrong.
Sometimes it's clear that the intent was to deceive, as in a case of an unfinished railroad where the stock was being offered for sale, but the newspaper article implies that the line was finished.
Sometimes, it just seems like a mistake or an accident, where the writer did not have all the facts, or misread, then misreported the facts.
So, first, what is this called? And how does one professionally deal with it, knowing that some of these articles have been cited as references in other works?
Today we use a term called "Fake News" which I really dislike, and would never use in a presentation on the history of a railroad.
I have seen so much of it over the decades of my research that I now realize that much of it was probably not by accident.
I know that the newspapers of the era I am describing was the primary media outlet available to people to get news and information, so I assume there was some intentional manipulation, but I don't know enough of the underlining issues with ownerships to understand it all.
They are often terrible sources for national and international news, and indeed it seems at times to have been kind of standard practice. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers' 2005 biography of H.L.Mencken is pretty illuminating on this subject. We'd consider Mencken good journalist, but he was above all concerned with getting a story out before every other paper. If the first information of an event- say, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake- consisted only of a telegram of a couple of lines, he was perfectly willing to embroider and invent enough text to make a front-page leading article in time for an extra edition to scoop the rival papers. No one seems to have punished Mencken for doing it- it was normal. James Thurber, who started out as a journalist, devoted one of his Fables for Our Time ( The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing) to this. Two rival sheep do undercover trips into Wolfland, and in their rush to print first get the story very, very wrong. Thurber's moral: Don't get it right: get it written.
But that doesn't mean they can't be used. Because once upon a time there were lots and lots of newspapers, often more than one in every town, newspapers can be really useful sources for local information- births, deaths, town meetings, announcements of political rallies, etc. They also can capture the local attitudes, biases, concerns. For example, I would not try to use an Indianapolis paper as a source for the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. But when the state of Indiana decided to have a monument built at Antietam battlefield around the same time, in honor of the Indiana troops that had fought there, there was extensive reporting on the debates, over the size of the appropriation by the state, and on the dedication when it was complete- all for a stone monument far away in a field in Maryland. For anyone doing research on the legacy of the Civil War in Indiana, that's great stuff.