I'm not sure either but I think it might be because in the back of your mind you know there's about 5-10 sentences worth of actual meat to the article (ie. quotes from the interviewees) but they spread them out over dozens of paragraphs. And act like this is entertaining for the reader.

edit: there's a cute widget/plug-in/extension for someone to build - make something that strips newspaper articles of all text except the quotes. May need some jiggering about to make it readable.