We do that in Arabic too. It's called "badal", a figure of speech where you replace "the whole" with "the part" to emphasize that part's importance in the context; in this case that would be either where the government is located in the country or where the report originated from.
For example when Arabic news agencies want to refer to the USA's government they say Washington or the white house. Since that's usually where the news come from.
Yeah some time ago I used to respect these companies I remember when Google condemned the Egyptian government's actions in 2011 and one of the very popular activists in the revolution was the head of marketing in Google MENA. But now the truth has never been more obvious to me. Individuals may or may not care but corporations will never care.