Not just news stories. This is a huge problem with social media and forums in general too. Lots of people making bold claims about random things, lots of stories they say are based on a third party source, but very few actual links to said sources in question.

I still remember a recent example where one of those trivia accounts on Twitter posted an interesting story about some guy whose life completely changed after an accident, but neither linked to a source or named the person in question.

The only way I was able to verify it was true was through someone in the comments asking the platform's AI chatbot, and the chatbot providing context that I could research and verify...