The other cheap trick is to write a news article and turn it into an editorial by finding random people who agree with the story writer's position and quoting them. This happens all the time with tv news where they interview the random guy on the street.They probably interviewed 20 people and only kept the opinion of the one person they agreed with.

This is too cynical. Citing your source is good practice and people should do it more (see Wikipedia for example). If you learned something by reading it on the Internet and post a link, at least then I know where you got it from, and there's less chance the message got garbled due to paraphrasing.

(Of course the source might not be reliable.)