They clearly do, but there is a difference between speculating and posing as the government and lying about what the real government is saying.

Which one is the Washington Post, when the US government says X, but the Post says they interviewed two anonymous insider sources and the truth is actually Y? Are they "posing as the government"?

Does that change if the sources happen to be wrong?

I don't understand the perspective of the other side of this position, at all, frankly. Contradicting official narratives isn't some edge-case scenario we're just thinking up; it's the core competence of the Fifth Estate.

When you read that on a newspaper you know that you're reading a newspaper and they tell you that they've talked with people that allegedly told them something different than the official line.

This doesn't happen with stuff like "no, no the Senate actually didn't pass that law yesterday" that are a matter of obvious public record.

If you're acknowledging a newspaper as a potential source of truth, you're no longer acknowledging the government as the sole source.

I'm going to put it this way: "reputable" newspapers generally want to influence opionion (lie) in a somewhat subtle way. Publishing trivially disprovable falsehoods about official acts isn't how they act, so you can generally trust the parliament-does-something -> official act -> newspaper writing about the official act custody chain insofar as the official act actually existing.

MBS, theocratic dictator of Saudi Arabia, is very fond of being the one source of truth about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Xi Jinping, communist dictator of China, is very fond of being the one source of truth about genocide of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Donald Trump, former corrupt president of the United States, is very fond of being the one source of truth about the 2020 election (or would be, if we let him).

They should have that right. I didn’t say otherwise, nor do I mean otherwise. That doesn’t mean that such speculation is an alternative source of truth for the government’s actual plans.