I can confirm this. I was involved in an incident once. The TV news reporters all came out and covered it. That evening, I watched the reports on the same event from 3 channels. They all got the basic facts 100% wrong, and each channel had a different set of those wrong facts.
It wasn't even an issue of bias, or making the story more compelling. It was simply slap-dash, string any-old list of crap together, run it, and move on to the next item.
I'm thankful that the city I live in has no media coverage. We've had police standing off with a guy barricaded in his own home on our street and nothing even touches the news even though they shut off the area for 5 hours.
I have no clue why, I think it might be because you can find police dispatch feeds for every neighboring city except ours. That's the only thing I can think of as I live in a very affluent area and the most we've ever got was the local paper covering a drive by shooting (I live in Canada so it's virtually unheard of, especially in my area - first in 15 years or something)
It wasn't even an issue of bias, or making the story more compelling. It was simply slap-dash, string any-old list of crap together, run it, and move on to the next item.
It was an eye-opening experience for me.