It's absolutely defamation if they have no or unreliable sources and something Reiner's son could sue over. They are a big enough publication to know the risks here.
They'll reveal those sources to a judge if it comes to it. They won't reveal them to the public because nobody wants to have their name attached to something like this.
It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
Meh. Information is often jumbled and wrong in the immediate aftermath of a newsworthy event, and it is tempting to accept tenuous claims which reinforce one's biases. Take the murder of Bob Lee, in which early reports were a bit off and convinced maaaaany people it was a street crime (confirming their biases about San Francsisco).
There's no real advantage to accepting PEOPLE's claim at this point. It's possibly wrong, and we'll probably know the truth in good time.
The Bob Lee comparison doesn't really hold up. The "random street crime" narrative there was driven primarily by right-wing tech executives on social media - Musk, Sacks, etc. - not by news outlets making factual claims. Fox amplified the SF crime angle but wasn't naming suspects (and I put Fox in it own category anyway, based on its track record).
Meanwhile, actual newsrooms did reasonable work: the SF Standard put nine reporters on it and ultimately broke the real story. Other local outlets pushed back on whether SF crime was as "horrific" as tech execs claimed.
Most importantly: speculating about the type of crime (random vs. targeted) isn't defamation. Naming a specific living person as a killer is. That's a categorically different level of legal exposure, which is why outlets don't do it unless they're confident in their sourcing. If this kind of reckless misattribution happened as often as people here seem to imply, defamation lawyers would be a lot busier and these outlets would be out of business.
That's still a terrible way of evaluating credibility, especially when a determination of defamation is not the same thing as a determination of truth.
Like I said
> It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
I wouldn't have felt bad if it did turn out to be wrong, I certainly left room open for doubt. But what I know about media outlets is they aren't often willing to put themselves in positions where they could get sued into oblivion.
There are obvious exceptions, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Candice Owens, but I think those exceptions have a level of insanity that powers their ability to make wild accusations without evidence.