Sounds like either Google is a terrible company with useless customer service and dysfunctional standard procedures, or known journalists and bloggers immediate

Sounds like either Google is a terrible company with useless customer service and dysfunctional standard procedures, or known journalists and bloggers immediately set off alarms when they use this recovery mechanism because there has been too much negative press about social engineering leading to account theft recently. I.e. perhaps they wanted to prove that his account is safe from cheap tricks.