While there is a glaring lack of references in journalism compared to what is considered normal (or even the bare minimum) in research (academic or otherwise),

While there is a glaring lack of references in journalism compared to what is considered normal (or even the bare minimum) in research (academic or otherwise), and that problem is cultural, you don’t have to assume malice to explain it. Like every cultural problem, it is self-perpetuating; but even aside from that, carefully collecting references is simply not the human default. I once tried to exhaustively document and cross-reference a pretty ordinary coding session of several hours, and took a surprising amount of effort, something like an hour of writing and pasting links from browsing history per two or three hours coding, and you need to do it every two or three hours or else you forget half of what you were thinking. Similar experience with writing down the results of what seemed to be a perfectly harmless week-long dive into mathematical literature. Annotated bibliographies (let alone anything more detailed) take time and work, which for standard newspaper journalism does not pay off.