There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet).
When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters", you need to translate it to something more like the following:
The journalist who wrote this has found a credible source, who has insider knowledge.
That source has requested anonymity, and the journalist finds that request credible.
The journalist then used their skills and experience in writing about this area over the course of their career to evaluate if that source was trustworthy. They also considered if the source had their own motivations which could affect what information they chose to share and why.
The journalist may have then cross-checked that information against other sources of information to help evaluate its credibility. This becomes more important the more high stakes the claim in question becomes.
An editor (and potentially even separate fact checkers) evaluated the statement as well, and applied judgement as to whether it held up firmly enough to be published.
There are so many phrases like this in top-tier journalism. When an experienced journalist reads an article from someone else that says "a senior official in the administration said..." they can often narrow that down to just a dozen or so potential people, based on their knowledge of that beat.
As a non-journalist reading newspapers this is pretty infuriating, because there's this whole language that you need to know about in order to fully understand what's being communicated here.
On the flip side, I believe everyone understands what you wrote. But it requires faith that the author and editors are writing in good faith, which has been decreasing for a long time.
Click bait headlines, stories with weak fact checking or even printing outright lies has decreased (at least my) trust in news articles and has resulted in me questioning facts and anonymous quotes more frequently(which may be a good thing).
They don't have to make up a source to be taken for a ride. Look at CNBC eating up the story about two guys (Ligma and Johnson) who were supposedly fired. If the source is anonymous we can't check they worked at Twitter.
Generally more than one person is checking employment documents on published news stories (not tweets). Not saying it never happens but it just doesn't happen with enough regularity to assume every anonymous source is fake.
Also, fairly reputable sources that produce mostly good quality journalism will slip in misinformation or hit pieces at the behest of political and corporate entities.
Examples are the New York Times writing a hit piece against Tesla, where it turned out they had driven the car in circles in a parking lot for hours to get the battery to run out, but didn't think that Tesla might be able to get data on what they did. Turns out the author of the article works for the oil industry. The NYT also regularly publishes as fact things told to them by the Pentagon and three letter agencies, rather than calling the information alleged.
I don't believe this at all. I think there's different tiers of journalism. One tier is going to publish "anonymous person says X" and that tier will be fast, sensational, and less accurate. Another tier is going to publish experts on the record and that tier is going to be slower, boring, and more accurate.
My perception of recent news tends is that sources that were in the accurate/quality tier are shifting to the fast/anonymous tier. In the short term their reputation plus speed and sensationalism will make them seem like the best of both worlds. In the long run people will just recalibrate their opinions of previously esteemed sources.
There absolutely are different tiers of journalism - but that's about quality and reputation of publication.
The Washington Post and the New Yorker have higher editorial standards than Fox News.
There are important stories for which it simply isn't possible to get an expert to go on the record, for all kinds of reasons.
What's going on inside Twitter right now is a great example. Anyone who leaks details with their name attached to them will clearly get fired, or sued, or both.
That's why good journalists quote anonymous sources. If they could get a reputable source to go on record instead they would obviously do so!
This makes it extremely easy to make low quality content that looks just like high quality content, with the only difference being that it's more likely to be found out to be wrong information. And it doesn't seem like we can reliably punish news organizations for constantly putting out bad news, so what's their motivation to do the high quality version?
I could believe you, but unfortunately journalists have trashed their credibility with their turn to "moral clarity" post-Trump. With the effective merger of the opinion and news beats in this era, "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters" could refer to anybody at all with a grudge against Musk, and we as readers would have no way of knowing which of the cases it is if the source's motivations align with WP's editor's motivations (to denigrate Musk). This report is from a paper that still employs Taylor Lorenz as a "columnist covering technology and online culture" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/), when her main beat is more about being the moral enforcer of the progressive media's opinions on tech, online culture, trans issues, etc.
Every reporter I have ever met (and this especially includes those that went to j-school) at this point just regurgitates press releases or is too scared to bite the hand (or the hands of the golfing buddies, or the advertisers) that signs their paychecks.
Weird, my experience is the opposite. All journalists I met in person and spoke to have been critical towards anything in any way reasonable. Including their bosses and institutions. It's a merit of journalism for introspection to be normal and wanted.
There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet).
When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters", you need to translate it to something more like the following:
The journalist who wrote this has found a credible source, who has insider knowledge.
That source has requested anonymity, and the journalist finds that request credible.
The journalist then used their skills and experience in writing about this area over the course of their career to evaluate if that source was trustworthy. They also considered if the source had their own motivations which could affect what information they chose to share and why.
The journalist may have then cross-checked that information against other sources of information to help evaluate its credibility. This becomes more important the more high stakes the claim in question becomes.
An editor (and potentially even separate fact checkers) evaluated the statement as well, and applied judgement as to whether it held up firmly enough to be published.
There are so many phrases like this in top-tier journalism. When an experienced journalist reads an article from someone else that says "a senior official in the administration said..." they can often narrow that down to just a dozen or so potential people, based on their knowledge of that beat.
As a non-journalist reading newspapers this is pretty infuriating, because there's this whole language that you need to know about in order to fully understand what's being communicated here.