So many people hear about bitcointalk forum from friends, families, internet and so on they where not given the full details of the Dos and Don'ts (the rules of the forum) of the forum. they where only told about the juicy parts of the forum because of that they are excited to join without making deep research.
Newbie should be corrected and not to be use to earn merits, most of the top rank members earn most of their merits from attacking and reporting newbie.
What do you mean by reporting newbies? You won't earn merit if you report messages to moderators. So if you're talking about newbies account exposed for scam, spam or plagiarism, people are doing that not to earn merits but to protect the forum and its users. It's very easy to open a fresh account here, you don't need to go through any KYC, so many people create accounts here in order to try to do bad things. That's why newbies and brand new account are often viewed with suspicion in the english part and in large local boards. But on most local boards