Let’s use an example: NBC: What's in Democrats' latest voting legislation, and what would the bills do?
You would think the first thing a news publication who is commenting on legislation would do is link the actual legislation. Surprising none of us they never actually link to the legislation. The second thing any supposed legitimate publication would do is use the actual verbiage of the bills in the article, which again never occurs in the article. Instead we have conjecture from multiple “sources” to support the bills, but no actual dissemination of the verbiage or even allowing the viewer to see the bills for themselves.
This all comes down to one thing, media relies on a lazy viewership that doesn’t verify anything that they are told. This is part of the mass delusion shown repeatedly from “the left” supporters. There is no depth to their arguments because they were never taught to verify, just to accept. Colleges have become bastions of this, where bad studies aren’t put under scrutiny and are trusted “as-is” simply because it supports the narrative they want to be reality. They train the doctors and scientists of tomorrow to blindly believe in the institutions. Even those who are supposedly the most intelligent among us are relied on to be lazy and accept information as told.
Not much to add, they can't even be bothered to link to the source when it is easily on the Web, see for instance
Anyhow I think it also has some motivation in keeping your news/journalistic source a walled garden (Most news site link only to their own article on the site about even other references) in conjunction with the even more reliance of the search engines to delist/deprioritize sources it will increase the hurdle to find data and keep people in the gardens.
All this reminds me of the EU article 11 (link tax) which would further worsen this behavior.
I once challenged a friend to find the source of the ‘Trump racist racist comments’ claim during the 2016 election. 18 article links later he gave up. The cycling of claims without direct linking gives two wins, 1. More clicks, and 2. Obfuscation of the claim.
Atleast he tried , most of the time I ask friends and acquaintance to even try they do about one or 2 clicks at the most.