alt Hacker NewsMeh. 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.