A better question is why most of it even got covered at all. Script kiddies deface and publish all the time - the only reason the press was covering at all was because it was pushed and packaged in PR friendly ways. Yawn.
How many previous groups of script kiddies have published such huge lists of email/password combinations? Note that publishing in an irc channel isn't the same as publishing on twitter, and giving the data away to a much broader audience.