It’s part of the sea change that happened starting with social media but significantly accelerated in the 2010s. It hit foreign policy first, I think, but by now it’s a feature of reporting for basically everything.

> Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”[1]

Rhodes here is talking about geopolitics, but it extends to everything. So many news outlets don’t actually have many people with practical experience anymore, and so they call random people for quotes.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-nov...