Pulse grounded search assigns fabricated outlet names to stories when the source domain is a local TV affiliate. Observed 2026-07-10 am staging: WSLS (a Virginia NBC affiliate at wsls.com) was labeled 'U.S. Energy Markets' in macro_events. The pipeline's source_name extraction produced a non-existent outlet name that the writer faithfully reproduced in the vibe paragraph as 'U.S. Energy Markets'. The linked article is real and accurate (gas prices at $3.84/gal, verified by AAA), but the outlet attribution is wrong. This is an upstream issue in _fmt_macro or the grounded search source_name extraction, not a writer fabrication.
The source_name field assigned during grounded search story extraction should fall back to the domain name (e.g. 'WSLS') when the LLM-extracted outlet name doesn't match any known news outlet. Could maintain a small allowlist of known outlet names, or do a simple web lookup of the domain to get the real outlet name. For local TV affiliates (wsls.com, clickondetroit.com, etc.), the domain usually contains the station call letters which are the correct outlet name.