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How do they have lower evidentiary standards than the average media outlet? All I know from the Blaze is their commentary channels, so evaluating evidence doesn't enter the question, but the Daily Mail in particular is definitely one of the world's top performers on this matter, and anyone who says otherwise can only do so because of blinding tribal hatred.
I would be interested in seeing someone argue that this is worse on an evidentiary basis than the Israeli rape dogs story.
The Israeli rape dogs story had a quoted source who attested that they personally were raped by a dog. In the Ohio mental hospital story I have seen vague assertions of anonymous tips, but no one has reported (as far as I have seen) that a source told them that they personally saw Talarico at the facility.
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If the Israeli rape dog story had been published as news, it would have been a scandal. The NYT's response was, correctly according to the rules of conventional journalism, "We don't fact check opinion pieces and are not responsible for Kristof's use of lying sources".
English libel law does not distinguish between false defamatory statements in news and opinion articles, so a newspaper like the Daily Mail whose standards are roughly "we will publish anything that won't get us sued" is going to refuse to publish something that a US paper would relegate to the "opinion" section due to a lack of fact-checking.
Under English law, republishing defamatory gossip and speculation without checking it is one of the main things reporters have to be taught not to do - there is a whole family of legal jokes about various ways of saying "I didn't say it was true, I just said other people were saying it" - none of which hold up in court if the defamatory statement turns out to be false. The 2013 Defamation Act which codified British libel law and removed most of the objectionable aspects did not change this.
Has any American journalist ever suffered legal consequences (criminal or civil) for false statements made under the guise of "sources say"? AI search overview provides a handful of journalists from the early 00's who were fired.
My understanding of American defamation law is that if you attribute remarks to a sufficiently identifiable source then you are deemed to be saying "other people are saying it", not "it is true".
We are talking about statements like "A source close to the Bishop told be that Iconochasm stole a statue of the Virgin Mary from Phoenix Cathedral and threw it into the Grand Canyon." In the UK, the newspaper* is legally liable unless you did, in fact, toss the statue. I think the newspaper is legally OK in the US as long as the cathedral security guard said it.
To report serious allegations based on a single pseudonymous source with no additional evidence is generally considered journalistic malpractice, so it doesn't surprise me that journalists have been fired for it.
* Like all civil liability, the employer and not the employee is on the hook.
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