Totally agree with you: all newspapers should cite sources. What’s silly to me is how selectively people care—big outlets get to hand-wave the “trust me” part even when a piece is basically a lightly rewritten press release, thinly sourced, or reflecting someone’s incentives more than reality.
Which by the way if you ever want to get in the paper that's how, it's super easy. AI will help you learn how to write in the right tone/voice for news if you don't know how.
You'd lose a lot of valid sourcing if you made this a requirement. For example, the Catholic Church scandal investigation would never have seen the light of day if the key legal sources corroborating the story had to give up their identity as part of the process. Speaking off the record is often where a lot of those kinds of stories come together.
And the reaction around the world to that story, the thousands of victims that came forward, resoundingly confirmed what people were saying on background.
Some may find it surprising that this is left over from the Sun's early support from the crypto journalism project Civil.