Let me put it this way: if this story came from the Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal it would a) be more measured and b) have a higher standard for making what is a serious accusation.
Any article published by the Washington Post is written by agents of their company, and that's why they are the responsible entity. Should you be able to sue every newsstand in your local city if they are selling a newspaper that defames you? After all, those newsstands are profiting from the sale of libelous content...
Washington post is a left-leaning news paper, but actually reputable as news can be in USA. Washington Times is basically another Breitbart or Infowars.
The New York Post doesn't have a great track record on being factually accurate though, whereas the Washington Post can reasonably assume articles published by the New York Times have undergone some reasonable standard of fact checking (even if imperfect), so it's not a reasonable comparison.
The problem you described is real, and is visible to some degree at all publications. But you're either misinformed or are being disingenuous if you think you can credibly claim that the Washington Times is in any way comparable to other more reputable publications in this regard. They are a clear outlier with a motivated bias.
The Washington Times does not skip research to get their publication out first, they deliberately craft misleading and false stories in order to serve their conservative narrative.
If the WaPo was making this up, then the NYTimes and Reuters would not have published independent confirmations. They are more than happy to hang each other out to dry if they can't confirm a story, especially one this momentous. That's the point of having multiple independent news outlets.
There are also few news sources more credible than the Washington Post.
I get the Sunday Washington Post. I get the same feeling there as well. The online version has more sensationalist headlines and articles, and also publishes opinion columns that never make it into print (like Hugh Hewitt and Marc Theisson) for the outrage clicks.
Washington Post? It's long been essentially the biggest rival to the NYT in terms of national political coverage, and my opinion is that as of late, it's been higher quality than the NYT.
The Washington Post has existed for 140 years and has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. It's the newspaper that broke Watergate.
You can acknowledge a news source for its editorial bias and still trust it not to print outright falsehoods on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal is editorially right-leaning but that doesn't mean I think it prints lies, I will trust it regarding statements of objective fact up to the point that you can trust any news source (of course both WaPo and WSJ flub stories and have to make retractions from time to time, journalists are humans).
You can't credibly make those comments about the Washington Post because they aren't true, and most educated people know that. Legally though, you're welcome to say (almost) whatever you want about them.
Sibling comments are correct:
The Washington Post is a reputable newspaper with a slight liberal skew.
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the media landscape in the US, or with how libel laws work here (hint: there is no potential libel on my part, that's ridiculous).
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