I always assumed that there is a lot of soft plagiarism in news, a lot of articles are essentially "here is some news that this other outlet has already reporte

I always assumed that there is a lot of soft plagiarism in news, a lot of articles are essentially "here is some news that this other outlet has already reported" sometimes with long (uncited) chains, it would not surprise me if they were both copying a third source. (even if the simplest solution is that they had a common editor, or that either or both articles have uncredited authors; my understanding is that uncredited secondary writers are quite common in news)