I mean, obviously, it was Googleable, as Buress said in his routine. And yet the question isn't whether or not it is "fake" -- though clearly many people thought it was fake, or outrageous, which is why it was such a funny bit in Buress's routine. But there's also the question of whether it was news. Because it was a big deal, and then it dropped off the news cycle because nothing big came from it. And then Buress simply reminded people that the cases existed and then it blew up in such a way that it's hard to believe that Bill Cosby, just a few years ago, was pretty much a hero.
The rape claims were such old news that a highly senior CNN journalist wrote Cosby's biography and just left out the rape accusations because he "didn't want to print allegations that I couldn't confirm independently". The Buress incident came about the time that the biography was published, and the biography pretty much died on the shelves:
Hell, you could make the case that the famous Boston Globe Pulitzer-winning investigation [0] into the Catholic Church would have been deemed "fake news" at the time. The Globe itself covered accusations of priest abuse a decade earlier and the Church argued that such cases were horrific anomalies, and the Globe editor at the time apparently agreed that there wasn't a systemic scandal. It wasn't until the Globe got a brand new editor that a renewed focus was made on cases that victims' lawyers had revealed years prior.
