I think terminology varies a bit by university (and maybe even by department within a university). At the college I attended, I learned from discussing with a few professors that the computer science department hired professors either for the "tenure track" or the "lecture track" (although no distinction in terms of title was presented to us as students, as far as I could tell). "Tenure track" professors were required to teach one course per semester and produce research, whereas "lecture track" professors were required to teach two courses per semester and had no requirement for research (although they were welcome to pursue it if they desired). As the naming implies, lecture track professors were not eligible for tenure, and most of the professors in the department were on the tenure track. This meant that the professors on the lecture track intentionally passed up the opportunity for tenure in order to focus their time on teaching. I personally found the courses I took with lecture track professors to benefit from the passion they had for this part of the profession. There were definitely tenure track professors who also cared as much about teaching and put in the same amount of effort into the course they taught each semester, but the only courses I took that felt like they suffered due to a lack of effort on the part of the professor were taught by tenure track professors. The sample size was much larger than for lecture track professors though, so I don't know for sure whether it's actually more likely that tenure track professors to "phone it in" for their courses, but it certainly seems like it would make sense.
As for the lecturer mentioned in the parent comment, I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions about whether they research or not from their title without looking into how things work at their institution/department, but at least in my experience people with the title "lecturer" tend to actually engage with students a lot more, so I wouldn't be surprised if they spoke with the journalist with the intention of sharing their own first-hand observations rather than from a research perspective.
