something I read about last year

Whenever you see sentences like this in the news:

“President Obama wrote a personal letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that a U.S. envoy delivered, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday… The official declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.”

According to something I read late in the Bush Era about White House journalism, “senior U.S. official” is actually code for “the President himself, deliberately and openly giving a story to the media without wanting to go on the record as having done so.” I never thought it went quite that high when I saw such elliptical phrases, and this has changed how I read certain news articles.