Yeah but we are not journalists. Of course everyone should make an effort to verify the things they read, but journalists are held to a higher standard because

Yeah but we are not journalists. Of course everyone should make an effort to verify the things they read, but journalists are held to a higher standard because verifying information like this and then making it available to us in an easily consumed format is literally their job. The journalists who published this failed at their jobs. We non-journalists who read and believed them just made a trivial and unimportant mistake.