With the possible exception of investigative journalists, a lot of journalists are incredibly lazy, incredibly busy, incredibly harried by deadlines, incredibly constrained by word counts, or all four at the same time. They're also taught to structure their articles with the most important information at the top and the least important at the bottom, and to place as few sentences in a paragraph as necessary. (The thinking behind this is that if an editor is going to cut, he or she is going to cut from the bottom up without a lot of regard for content, which saves the editor's time; this is appalling, but true. Additional thinking goes that the reader is as time-pressed and attention-short as the editor, and may only read a few lines before leaving the story, so you'd better let them know the essentials as efficiently as possible, meaning that the details are not considered nearly as important.)

All of this together, in my experience, frequently leads to odd constructions because the writer is not thinking ahead to future paragraphs; he or she is only thinking about the current paragraph, and what needs to go in it. They worry about additional (and in theory less important) information when they get there later. This is why you'll often see odd addendums as their own one-sentence paragraphs that come after more comprehensive paragraphs.

So I think you're making leaps in logic that are based on the assumption of a much higher degree of language precision than exists in most of the journalism field. :p