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How German news tells you where it got something
Read a German news item with lesson 80 and this one in hand and the sourcing becomes visible as machinery. Almost every sentence that reports a claim carries a marker: a subjunctive verb, a laut or zufolge, a nach Angaben, or an adverb. Sentences with no marker at all are the publication's own assertions, and there are fewer of them than you might expect. There is a legal reason for the density, and it is worth knowing because it explains why the habit is so consistent. German law gives a person named in a report a right of reply — der Gegendarstellungsanspruch, granted by the press laws of the individual Bundesländer. A Gegendarstellung is not a correction and not a judgement about who was right: it is the subject's own statement of their version, which the publication is obliged to print in comparable prominence, whether or not it agrees. You will occasionally see one in print, headed Gegendarstellung and reading oddly because it is somebody else's text inside the paper's own pages. Separately, the Deutscher Presserat, the self-regulatory press council, handles complaints and can issue a public Rüge, a reprimand, against a publication; its code makes truthfulness and the duty to correct explicit. Careful attribution is what keeps a publication out of both procedures, and Konjunktiv I is the cheapest form of it. Two practical reading habits follow. First, notice whether a striking claim in a German article is in the indicative or not — if it is attributed and subjunctive, the publication is telling you it has not verified it, and that is information. Second, the phrase Eine Anfrage blieb unbeantwortet, or Das Unternehmen wollte sich nicht äußern, is doing real work: it records that the other side was asked. Its absence in a piece about a dispute is worth noticing too. On sources themselves, two German institutions shape what you read. The dpa, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, supplies the wire copy that many outlets print with light editing, which is why the same sentences appear in several papers in identical form — not plagiarism but the wire. And the öffentlich-rechtliche outlets, ARD and ZDF, are funded by the Rundfunkbeitrag that lesson 73 made you pay, which is the practical reason the Tagesschau's language is the register most reference material treats as standard news German. One last thing about angeblich, because it is the word learners reach for too readily. It is not a neutral hedge. Using it about a person's account implies you doubt them, and in an email to a colleague — Sie hat angeblich abgesagt — it will read as an insinuation rather than a careful reservation. If you only mean that you heard it second-hand, the safe options are soll plus an infinitive at lesson 82, or a plain Ich habe gehört, dass …