Isn't one of the key elements of ethical journalism that you need to ask the subject of your article for comments? I have a hard time believing they asked Google to comment on this piece and didn't get "that is categorically false and if you publish it you will be hearing from out attorney" as an answer. So I don't really see how this one got through unless they didn't ask for comments.

This would be like the SWE equivalent of pushing to production without code review. It's not an excusable mistake like when a bug gets through.