Put it this way: I don’t think their motivation was to put one over on a gullible public. I think they got an early taste for the positive reinforcement that comes from writing hard stories, discovered an easy way to write them, and got fabulous rewards for their shortcuts. I don’t think it started as willful deception, but it grew into that.
Still, they’re far from the most egregious. It’s not like they claimed that the Spanish sank the USS Maine or anything.
Not as true as you might think. I seem to recall that when Carol Burnett sued the National Enquirer way the hell back when (1980 or so?) the judge disallowed a defense that they were a newspaper and instead ruled that as a magazine they didn’t have the same protections (barring ‘absence of malice’ and libal and such) that actual newspapers did.
I’m going to have to ask for a cite here. (I could go look this case up myself, but right now I don’t have the time.) I know of no principle in First Amendment jurisprudence that makes any distinction between magazines and newspapers, or indeed among any types of publication.
In fact, I believe that Burnett did successfully prove “reckless disregard for the truth,” which is the standard for defamation of public figures.