Thanks for this. I'm absolutely in shock this process is so industrialized, and that it has apparently managed to survive so long, and even through fake news being a huge topic in US politics

I would guess because there’s no real coercion in it. A company has every interest to make it as easy as possible to news outlets to run the story and to so they write the whole thing and leave it to the journalists if they want to do anything else with it. Some - many - are lazy and just publish it verbatim.