As I’ve made pretty clear, I am not a fan of the “explanatory journalism” trend that purports to take an empirical approach to explaining complex issues. Its chief practitioners are a bunch of young, terribly biased journalists who tend to treat politics and policy as some sort of game, even as they broadcast their ignorance. Anyway, if you want a concise example of why explanatory journalism is bad—so pure and crystalline it could have been produced by Walter White—let me direct you to this Vox.com piece on Medicare. 

Right off the bat, the headline is not encouraging: “Medicare isn’t going bankrupt. This chart proves it.” Sure enough, Vox has produced a chart showing that for the last 40 years, the Medicare Trustees report has projected the date of Medicare’s insolvency and those insolvency dates keep getting pushed back. The conclusion drawn from a narrow and silly set of data points is that “hand-wringing [over Medicare’s fiscal predicament] is pretty much unnecessary” because Congress will take care of the problem: