That's not a fitting example. Newspapers often compile sources from wire sources (in which case the original author or the name of the service receives credit), or their reporters perform their own research. That's primary source research, and it's completely different from citing bibliographic sources.

When I was in undergraduate school, one semester I did a research paper which involved reading through 1200-1900 year old source material. It still had to be cited.

Within the context of source code, I like the GNU guideline for the largest possible code snippet that does not fall under the GPL -- ten lines is all you get. But it's the choice of the author as to the license of the code. Not you.

Give credit where it's due.