So... I can speak to this because I've listened to almost the entire TAL back catalog, lol.
The show has a stronger journalistic focus now than it did 10 years ago and _way_ more than it did 20 or (almost!) 30 years ago. It's always been part of the show—people who complain that TAL "didn't used to be political" clearly don't remember how many segments they ran about the Iraq war—but for the first decade or so the show had a very strong focus on the arts; they'd have a lot of guests sharing personal essays, short fiction, etc.
The serious journalism-type stories were generally either (1) on-the-ground reporting from their own staff, like a really great episode where they toured an aircraft carrier (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/206/somewhere-in-the-arabia...), (2) stories sourced from other journalists or professional organizations who had serious reputation to lose if they were caught in the supply chain of misinformation, or (3) "this is a thing that happened to me"-type firsthand accounts and observations. And I guess the now-debunked Apple factory story falls into the third category, but the types of stories that had previously fallen into that category tended to be far smaller in scale and/or were presented as more subjective than the Apple story had been.
All of that to say that I think you raise a valid question, and I'm sure some stuff slipped through the cracks over the years, but I also think the implication of that crack-slipping was far less dire in the show's earlier days, and there were just fewer news-ish stories overall.
The show has a stronger journalistic focus now than it did 10 years ago and _way_ more than it did 20 or (almost!) 30 years ago. It's always been part of the show—people who complain that TAL "didn't used to be political" clearly don't remember how many segments they ran about the Iraq war—but for the first decade or so the show had a very strong focus on the arts; they'd have a lot of guests sharing personal essays, short fiction, etc.
The serious journalism-type stories were generally either (1) on-the-ground reporting from their own staff, like a really great episode where they toured an aircraft carrier (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/206/somewhere-in-the-arabia...), (2) stories sourced from other journalists or professional organizations who had serious reputation to lose if they were caught in the supply chain of misinformation, or (3) "this is a thing that happened to me"-type firsthand accounts and observations. And I guess the now-debunked Apple factory story falls into the third category, but the types of stories that had previously fallen into that category tended to be far smaller in scale and/or were presented as more subjective than the Apple story had been.
All of that to say that I think you raise a valid question, and I'm sure some stuff slipped through the cracks over the years, but I also think the implication of that crack-slipping was far less dire in the show's earlier days, and there were just fewer news-ish stories overall.