This is definitely Mason's MO, he regularly pulls this trick of quoting a source and then reinforcing it to present a very particular angle, but always done with a "some might say" air of faux impartiality.
I once had a ridiculous argument with someone who was claiming that some news source or other was unbiased, and I pointed out that even just the order you present news in gives different prominence to their perceived importance (e.g. at the moment, leading loads of bulletins with how many people have arrived in boats amplifies it way beyond its actual statistical significance), even if the reporting was just factual. Different sources with different agendas make conscious choices about the order, very obviously.
Equally, how you start and end a report (and the headline, obviously) is how you sway your audience to your agenda.
And notice how Mason doesn't actually give an attributable quote in quotation marks, so what the 'source' actually said and what is Mason's opinion is very unclear. As slippery as a slippery thing.
