Just-auto Toyota "plant" story just as fake as WSJ?

The July 15 quote from Just-auto is as follows;


"That story was planted by Toyota," an NHTSA spokeswoman told just-auto. "Toyota is the source - yes we know that for definite.


"It is [the] Toyota PR machine. We knew they were going to put it out."


My questions are; 

1. If you were writing for a living would you have missed the closed quotation mark after definite?
2. Would you have included an additional space between the first part of the quote and the second part as Just-auto did?
3. What reporter worth their salt wouldn't have asked the question "how did you know they were going to put it out?"

If I was playing reporter (as I am now) I would have asked a lot of additional questions such as "how do you know it for definite?" "did the WSJ tell you?" "did someone at Toyota?" "you claim to know in advance that they were going to put this story out, didn't you contact them or Congress and tell them they may be breaking the law?" "aren't there rules about congressional investigations?" "it was your information that was going to be leaked to the WSJ surely an administrator in NHTSA would want to contact Toyota to caution them at the very least, wasn't that done?"

Just-auto must have asked some of these questions, too bad they didn't bother to include the response (or lack there of) in their article. Maybe it would have made their source look bad?


As is often the case I find, what is not in a news story is more interesting than what is.