The (science) news cycle occurs when the original source is quoted by another news outlet, which is quoted by another outlet, etc, creating a “telephone game”, a.k.a. “Chinese whispers” familiar from kindergarten. Each re-reporting introduces noise to the previous report, so the end result may differ diametrically from the original story. This news cycle has been identified and mocked before, e.g. by PhD Comics.
The telephone game of news outlets has an additional aspect that I have not seen mentioned, namely that the re-reporting does not add random noise, but noise that biases the previous source deliberately. Each news outlet, blog or other re-poster has a slant and focusses on those aspects of the story that favour its existing viewpoint.
A single outlet usually does not change the story to the complete opposite of the original, because outright lying is easy to detect and would damage the outlet’s reputation. However, many outlets in a sequence can each bias the story a little, until the final report is the opposite of the original. Each outlet’s biasing decision is difficult to detect, because the small bias is hidden in the noise of rephrasing and selectively copying the previous outlet’s story. So each outlet can claim to report unbiased news, if readers do not question why the outlet used second-hand (really n-th hand) sources, not the original article (the first in the sequence). A single manipulator thus has an incentive to create many websites that report each other’s stories in a sequence.
The moral of this text is that to get accurate information, read the original source. Whenever you see an interesting news article, work backward along the sequence of reports to see whether the claims are the same as in the first report. The first report is not guaranteed to be true, but at least the biases and honest errors introduced later can be removed this way.