I noticed in both of these articles that the quoted speaker’s grammar has not been corrected, but without the usual [sic] notation. In the past I believe I’ve seen grammar corrected with [square brackets] changing tense. The first two words of the first quote would be [We saw], for example. Is this a convention in journalism, or was it ever? Is there possibly a desire by the article’s author or editor to make the quoted people appear less reliable as a source for quotes?
In journalism, it’s generally preferred to quote exactly, without correction or using [sic], especially for speech (the AP says short ellipses are sometimes OK, but nothing else). In academic writing, [sic] is probably used more, especially when quoting written material.
In these cases, I don’t think that the reporter is trying to make the subjects look unreliable; they’re just quoting exactly what was said, like a good journalist.
I was a reporter both in college and later for my local small-town paper. Both times the rule was to quote your sources exactly, even if it made the speaker look like an ignorant doofus. There was a time or two when I’d rephrase what someone told me when it was too mangled, tangled or dumb-sounding, politely but to his/her face, and get assent to the revised quotation.
I remember hearing about reporters covering the first Mayor Daley of Chicago, who had famously-mangled syntax which was routinely cleaned up by the City Hall press corps before the presses rolled out the next day’s paper. One veteran reporter explained, “We quote what he meant, not what he said” (or words to that effect 
).
So if you say “So you mean to say such and such” and they assent, you use it as a direct quote?