Lazy, sure. Credulous? Maybe. But by the time I’d been in the news biz for a few years I’d realized that truly worthwhile stories didn’t come waltzing into my arms very often. Yet like a cop issuing speeding tickets, I had a quota to meet.
So what Andrew Ferguson calls the Chump Effect, i.e. reporters taking any old social science “development” at face value, was more often my attempt to stay employed while waiting for a better story to come along.
Editors were, more or less, in the same fix. Making us easy targets for analysts like AF. But what did we care? Pay checks came once a week and, like Ms. O’Hara so wisely put it, tomorrow was another day.
