[nohuck13]

"the incentives for any individual reporter are just too great - having the government make a major policy change based on your article is basically the brass ring for an investigative reporter"

Yep, this is the framing I came here looking for.

Investigative journalists live in the same asymmetrically-incentivized world as social science researchers. If the reporter had looked into the phenomenon and concluded "yeah, boring technical logic pretty much works as expected here" then there's no story.

[nohuck13]

I wonder if the NYT editorial staff receives zillions of these pitches from their reporters purporting to reveal nefarious phenomena, and most of them turn out benign. It's fun to imagine that the NYT editorship is actually exceedingly good at detecting these outrage-false-positives before publication, but the base rate of outrage-true-positives is just so low that you have to expect some to make it to publication.

I'd like to imagine there's an investigative-journalism-editor-news somewhere, and they're discussing this discussion saying "bah, these clowns are making sweeping generalizations about editorial standards based on only a false positive; this is totally specious with no mention of the prior distribution or sensitivity vs specificity trade-offs"