This is a common, infuriating practice: provides a veneer of authoritativeness and credibility to newspaper articles, and who is ever going to click on the links that support those very cogent claims? Nobody of course, so they just link to another article with more vague claims, and at any further level deep your willingness to verify that information evaporates at the same rate as the information itself.
But hey, in the meanwhile the author has managed to sneak in that "scientists have found" and that if you don't believe it you must be anti-science.
Incidentally, highlighting this abuse (together with a bunch of other quality and fact-checking) would be a great use of AI on online news publication.