Hard-luck, heart-tugging stories are great for cheap journalism but an absolutely terrible basis for policy-making. There’s a cliche in the legal community that “hard cases make bad law.” The political corollary might be that sob stories make bad policy. Every single law — every single one — has a sob story attached to it. That’s the thing about laws: They’re meaningless when not attached to a punitive consequence.

Anecdotes are obviously more powerful than data. They’re personalized and real in ways numbers never will be. But anecdotes also provide a really cheap means of simultaneously avoiding rigorous thought and making yourself appear more compassionate or caring than everyone else. “This law hurt this person, therefore we need to change that law. What, you don’t care that that person is hurt? You must be a monster.”

That train of thought is precisely what activist reporters are trying to power in the minds of their readers. They’re doing this at the expense of all the many people in the world who aren’t well-connected enough to get their sob stories on air. They’re doing this at the expense of people, including future generations, who will have to pay in untold and unknown ways for a new policy that fails to address looming systemic problems.