NPR grudge?

A week ago, NPR published an article called The Government Spent $300 Million Making Coins No One Wants. This week, they published an article called How Frequent Fliers Exploit A Government Program To Get Free Trips, which I saw posted on someone's feed. What's interesting is that the Wall Street journal published the same story in 2009.

The article goes on to present, as if it were news happening now, the situation where some people realize that they can order dollar coins using their credit card, build up frequent flier miles, and deposit the coins directly into the bank. The Wall Street Journal article, in 2009, covered the same story - when it was actually happening. The NPR article presents this situation like it's something that has happened recently, while in fact the Mint put in safeguards at least a year ago to prevent this from happening - any individual credit card can only order $1000 in coins per ten days. It also says these rolls are not to be deposited directly into the bank - though I don't know if/how they check up on this. Some people may still be doing this with dollar coins, but certainly at a less alarming rate than before.

Further reading of the NPR article actually goes on to explain that these things are, more or less, _not_ happening right now. This leaves me wondering what the point of NPR publishing the article - on something that happened a few years ago - was. Were they hoping people would skim it and think it was happening now? Why? It's also interesting that they would publish, essentially, two very obviously anti-dollar-coin articles just over a week apart. Is there someone at NPR who is associated with Save the Greenback? That was a joke. I think.