Oh yeah, I know. Even "reasonable" people I know, when prompted on it, seem to drift off in their own mind and start mumbling "Well, I think she said some transphobic things..." or "I think she said some not very pleasant things?" without ever bothering to articulate it further.
It's utterly bizarre. It seems disturbingly self-aware - the general public has no details on that story beyond "JK Rowling is transphobic", the media doesn't have any motivation to go into specifics - the narrative would fall apart. So everyone just continues parroting "JK Rowling is transphobic" because that's literally all they can do, hoping like hell nobody actually reads what she said.
People have lives to lead and stuff to do; they don't have time to dig in to a rabbit hole to find out who said what exactly in which context (context that may not necessarily be immediately obvious I might add). And it sure doesn't help that Twitter's interface makes all of this hard, and that with the character limit you need to take some "niceties" as implied rather than assuming the worst.
And that's all fine actually: more important things in life ya know. It's always worked like this, and is why we have professional journalists who figure out this kind of stuff for us and give us a summary. But what's happened in recent years is that "journalism" has changed a lot.
Ben Shapiro isn't a journalist but a pseudo-journalist. Just as a pseudo-scientific quack might adopt the outward appearance of science without actually doing science, that Daily Wire site of him has the appearance of journalism without actually doing much journalism. The same applies to Vice on the left and various other outlets. Sometimes it's a mixture: Vox can do some good journalism at times, but also published pseudo-journalism. Sometimes I've even seen both mixed in the same article!
I don't expect journalists to be completely free of bias as that's impossible, and I'd argue it's not even desirable as various outlets with a certain political slants can be quite good, but just put a little bit of effort in to it ya know, that goes a long way. In the past journalism was a profession, now anyone with an internet connection can be a "journalist". Crazy cooks like Alex Jones can be a "journalist". How do you know what "good" and "bad" journalism is? Trust what the other journalist says? How do you know they're not a pseudo-journalist? It's genuinely much more difficult to figure out what's true or not. Not that this was always perfect in the past, but it sure was *better*.
"The news" is especially problematic. An article "Gladstone Gander calls Donald Duck anti-geese racist" is true and unbiased in the sense that's it's factual reporting on the indisputable fact that Gladstone called Donald a racist, but it's not really "journalism" in any serious sense, is it? There's all sorts of other problems with the news such as rare events being highlighted. I really hate the news. Don't watch the news. The news has always been a shitshow.
It's not hard to see how people walk around with the vague impression "oh, JK Rowling is transphobic". Actually, I never really looked in to what she did or didn't say either: as far as I'm concerned maybe she is, maybe she's not; I have no real opinion and to be honest I don't really care; why should I care about the opinion from some artist whose work I don't really appreciate (yeah, I don't like Harry Potter, deal with it)? I did take a look at Graham Linehan's substack some time ago (I like his work more), and he does seem to have gone off the deep end a bit. The huge amount of vitriolic backlash even over much more moderate things he said in the past probably plays part in that: it's a bit of a toxic feedback loop.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the internet sucks and in hindsight was kind of a bad idea that made a lot of people very angry.