The journalistic norm for years has been, as long as you don't lie, no one can prove you were being dishonest, so you get to keep your credibility. So, what happened instead is they used other tactics to insinuate, without stating. My favorite version of this is to leave out the facts and just get quotes. This is the "'Administration is lying about facts', congressman says", kind of headline. It allows the reporter to insinuate that something is true by getting a quote from someone, without having to put their name on the lie. No where in the article will there be any attempt to answer the question of whether it's true or not.
Yeah, citing someone is a cheap hack to put propaganda into an article. Nothing really is going to change much for an average reader, except for who is going to influence them and how much.
The whole fact checking thing is a bit subtle. They are essentially excluding all anti-western organisations from fact-checkers, weakening foreign anti-western influence over readers. Manufacturing consent is also going to get easier.
The other cheap trick is to write a news article and turn it into an editorial by finding random people who agree with the story writer's position and quoting them. This happens all the time with tv news where they interview the random guy on the street.They probably interviewed 20 people and only kept the opinion of the one person they agreed with.
This is too cynical. Citing your source is good practice and people should do it more (see Wikipedia for example). If you learned something by reading it on the Internet and post a link, at least then I know where you got it from, and there's less chance the message got garbled due to paraphrasing.
