We’ll look at an example from another US state media outlet: Radio Free Asia
In 2014, Radio Free Asia wrote a story claiming North Korean students were forced to get the Kim Jong Un haircut. The story spread like wildfire. It was on all the news stations, all the talk shows, Kimmel, Colbert, John Oliver. TV commercials riffed on it. The whole American media ecosystem was unanimous, everyone believed this shit. Regular people on the street could tell you about it.
Then it came out that Radio Free Asia made it up. Someone at Radio Free Asia sat down and deliberately wrote a false story with the intent to deceive the public, and then Radio Free Asia published that story as fact in order to smear an enemy of the United States.
Radio Free Asia, like VoA, has excellent scores on all the media bias and fact-checking sites. This is because they sprinkle their bullshit carefully. RFA’s hit pieces are mixed in among hundreds of ordinary, mundane, reputable current events stories. You go to the site and you see headlines like you might see on any other site. But when you go digging, you start to find dozens of unsourced claims about China and North Korea mixed in. The rest is just reputation laundering to support the bullshit.
If you asked an intelligent person, “how would you publish propaganda,” RFA is the format they would come up with.