After 1978, when Carol Burnett sued the National Enquirer for claiming she was an alcoholic when she wasn’t (she won that case, by the way), American tabloids have been pretty careful to vet their sources. I order to sell papers and print gossip, they write the articles in such a way as to not constitute libel. It’s the people reading such stuff that make the mental leap from “he said she said” to truth by themselves.
In Britain, the laws are much more stringent as to what constitutes libel and slander, and the burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused, as in the US, so things that wouldn’t get published here are published there.