> I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.

Bafflingly, I’ve found this practice to continue even in places like University PR articles describing new papers. Linking to the paper itself is an obvious thing to do, yet many of them won’t even do that.

In addition to playing games to avoid outbound links, I think this practice comes from old journalistic ideals that the journalist is the communicator of the information and therefore including the source directly is not necessary. They want to be the center of the communication and want you to get the information through them.

They can't meaningfully link to the paper, because they relinquish all their copyright on the paper to the journal.