"A journalist could not make up a harmful statement about someone and get away by saying the readers should have all read the sources."

Journalists do that all the time. We even have a whole collection of words to describe it. Muckraking for instance is probably about 100 years old. Its even in the Google auto-complete in the browser I am posting from.

Notice the “get away with” part. Journalists can be held liable for making things up. And so should Google.