"Off the record," do journalists ever make up quotes or details as filler information for a story?

A communications professor told me when I was in college that "all good reporters have made things up." Later, I read that in a book written by a former Chicago Tribune writer. For a while after college, I did some freelance writing, and I found that to be somewhat true. I never deliberately lied or made false claims, but on more than one occassion, I assumed some very minor things to be true (such as whether city council had approved a first or second reading of an ordinance that had been in place for centuries...) After college, I moved out of the journalism field, but a good friend of mine now works for a newspaper and claims that she has never tried to cheat the system and that she bets no other reporters do either. I can't be the only one out there who has come up with their own fillers?? (After all, doesn't EVERYBODY take the easy way out now and then in ANY job?)