Except the middle man can actually serve a purpose here. I would actually like someone to distill highly academic articles full of technical jargon into layman's terms that I can skim in a few minutes. The fact they don't link the original paper is just bad journalism.
It's also bad journalism when newspapers frequently misunderstand the original source completely or sensationalize one piece of the source completely out of context for extra clicks. But, there's not much we can do about that.