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> Why do so many news articles do this?

Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.

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If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)

But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may notice that those trusty journalists weren’t accurately representing the content of source material in their articles.

That would be bad (for the media company).

They don't want to host a document with very little engagement. They want to serve articles that are short and lead to more page views.

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