Paretan newspaper editor: David Salino assails as distorted our quotat

This is a great Veritas Prep question. I am not a non-native speaker, but as a general rule of thumb you can assume that synonyms do NOT exist in critical reasoning questions. It is very easy to overlook this and think that the question is just mixing up their word choice, but the question is almost always instead shifting scope. Veritas has a very basic example of this scope shift in the example:

Premise) All men are mortal
Premise) Socrates is a dog
Conclusion) Therefore Socrates is mortal

The missing assumption here would link those premises together, saying something like "What is true of men is true of dogs." This argument's flaw is of course much more obvious, but it is the exact same flaw that occurs here. Here the argument reads:

Premise) Our quotation was an acceptable translation
Premise) No newspaper can be blamed when their reporting is accurate
Conclusion) The consequences are not our fault

Just as men are not the same thing as dogs, acceptable translation is not the same thing as accurate reporting. My advice would be to always be VERY suspicious when two premises use different words, as they are probably using this nasty scope shift trick. Answer choice A links these premises together, and is thus correct.

An interesting sidenote, answer choice E would be correct also if the word "only" were not included. The fact that one of the premises relies on the judgement of scholars or people with official standing means that it must be assumed those people are in a position to pass judgement over the acceptability of translations. It does not, however, have to be assumed that they are the "only" ones able to pass this judgement, and thus that word "only" goes too far and makes this answer choice incorrect.

I hope this helps!