Yet More Propaganda...

People who are not accustomed to seeing neutral news often don't recognize it when they see it. The focal event here is not seven anonymous officials saying something; it is Reuters saying that seven anonymous officials said something, and we have extremely high confidence that Reuters did in fact say that. The idea that they're just making it up is, of course, deeply unlikely, but we have pointedly alerted the reader to that aspect of the situation, and if it later turned out to be the case that Reuters invented this story, that would be a huge story (exactly because it's so profoundly unlikely) and one really hopes we would cover it (and this article would then get an {{update}}).

The seventies was the decade of the Watergate scandal; pretending that anonymous sources were not used in the seventies is unadulterated bullshit.