Usatoday serves its media as MP4, and that is exactly what you keep. The container is passed through rather than rebuilt, so there is no generation loss between what Usatoday stored and what ends up in your downloads folder. Usatoday is handled by the media route, which reads the site's own rendition list before choosing anything. No credentials are involved anywhere in this path — neither yours nor ours.
Either paste a Usatoday link above, or put tikt.com/ in front of any Usatoday URL in your address bar:
tikt.com/https://www.example.com/path/to/media
What you actually have to do
1. Copy the Usatoday link
Use the address bar or the platform's own share button — both give a URL the extractor recognises. Point it at the single item you want, not the page around it.
2. Let it read the renditions
Paste the URL above. The extractor asks Usatoday which renditions exist for that item and picks the best progressive one rather than assuming a quality.
3. Save what comes back
The file arrives in the container Usatoday served it in, and the extractor does not rebuild it — so what you end up with is what the uploader encoded, for better or worse.