I too was perplexed by that. Moral panics are the stock-in-trade of the sensationalist press, so blaming algorithms for speeding up what was already wrong with the media is kinda ridiculous. The basic problem is that there is a lot of money to be made by telling dramatic-sounding lies to people who want their worldview corroborated. News is a pretty competitive market, so it's not very surprising that the quality of news tends towards a lowest common denominator.