It has attribution and everything but is just copy pasting an answer from another website journalism now?
I also have direct reports (my wife) of journalists asking questions in the streets to many people until they got the answer they were looking for. I bet it is common practice: you are not only told to write a piece about X, you are also implicitly told what to write and you just bend your material, data or street interview or whatnot, in the direction that will get the more emotional reaction from the reader.
Disc: I'm talking about French journalism here, maybe US journalism or Eskimo journalism is magically much better, I don't know.
(But yes, to your point, Forbes is not a "journalism" site.)