I've been worrying about this.
The first, instinctive answer is yes, of course, check everything that can be checked before publication.
But on consideration of the tradeoffs, I'm not sure that is what we want. https://twitter.com/AntonHarber/status/1264439054503903232

A lot of what News24 does is far closer to wire reporting than to magazine journalism: fast, reported speech, maybe some context, but the priority is to get it out there rather than ponder the implications first.

That's true of a lot of us online-only publications, and I wonder to what extent that would have been the case were it not for the demise of Sapa. You need a wire. If that niche is empty, someone (or several someones) will evolve into it.

(The argument with wire reporting used to be that the wire captures the speech, and it was up to newspapers to layer the journalism on top of that before presenting it to readers. Now we rely on readers to do more heavy lifting. Separate discussion, but maybe worth having.)

It would be awesome if News24 were to do full checking and verification before publishing.
But even if resources were infinite, wires wouldn't, because speed is more important.
I think there used to be broad consensus that this was a societal good.

Resources are very far from infinite, of course.

I can't speak to News24's numbers, but I know roughly what full checking would mean on the BI side: 1/12th.
As in, to guarantee everything bulletproof before publication within the same budget, we would be able to publish one twelfth of what we currently do.

Now, maybe you like the idea of more than 90% of news going away so the rest is perfect. It's a tempting thought.
But I already cry myself to sleep every night in mourning for all the stories we aren't telling, all the constituencies we aren't serving, all the voices unheard.

And the more we have to triage, the more importance is invested in us as gatekeepers, the more you hand over power to the media.
I, for one, am not entirely comfortable with that. Covering more and letting readers decide what is important would be better.

It's not all-or-nothing, though, right? You can check important, contentious statements with a factual basis only, find a middle ground. There's stuff that cries out for it, and this is such an example.

Well, yes and no. To spot contentious stuff that may be bullshit, you need context. Two ways to get that context: stick to a beat system, where only specialist reporters cover specialist fields, or demand from general reporters a level of research that makes them insta-experts.

The tradeoffs on those are pretty bad. If only health reporters covered the coronavirus disaster, we'd miss out on a lot of important stuff, and they'd miss the political and other issues for which they lack context.
And more time on a single story again leaves lots unreported.

And so News24 reports a factual claim by an expert without checking it first. Much shouting ensues. The public discourse goes off track. Society suffers. There are calls for Things To Change, and that News Outlets Must Do Better.
And if they do?

Then something else will have to give, I reckon. Probably for the worse.