My guess is Google, Microsoft, Signal, Apple, Cloudfare, etc etc etc have all been asked if they could make backdoors. I expect they have all been asked. It's not the same as asking if they have made a backdoor.
So I think a journalist asking an organization like Google if they've been asked isn't really informative, because they almost certainly have been.
I'm not sure how it's relevant other than to say an answer from Google's response might seem oblique, but they're also being asked obliquely and that colors how you might interpret their response.
