Children are happy to confirm what they have seen with evidence from their own experience. But, it seems they are also quite prepared to implicitly accept the news items from beyond their own experience, at face value. I think that this throws up one interesting point. Grossing this up as it were, it would appear that very many mature adults treat their daily diet of television news in precisely the same way. So, perhaps many peoples attitude to the news is shaped from teenage years and never actually changes.
Television news is a careful construction designed to fit into a specific formatted timeslot.
It is a process of selection, editing and presentation. There is a particular narrative structure involved. The very term news story itself suggests an unfolding of events to an end, as in the fictional narrative. But the narrative codes of television in general do not apply to news broadcasts. In a sense the news actually reverses the structure.