An example of a standard debate, which I have experienced many times, is in today's Slate.
Jack Schafer takes on a story, more
than a year old, from the New York Times, which wildly inflated data
on sex slaves and made it into a national crisis.
I find, in this story, the same traditional issues that keep popping up: prudery, NYTimes bias and incompetence and the general inability of Americans to cope with statistical data.
The two worst cases of this
statistically-blind-prudery occurred in the early 1980s when the
major 
news outlets announced an epidemic of child kidnappings at a
level in excess of 125,000 annually for the U.S. Only a German
writer raised any question about the data. He found that actual
stranger abductions of children, a federal case, never exceeded 130
per year.
Similarly, the press found wanton satanic sexual abuse of children in day care centers across the country. Cases were reported to be in the tens of thousands annually. More than 200 trials occurred in which more than 200 innocent people were given extensive prison sentences. Not a single case of satanic sexual abuse of a child was ever found based on legally reliable evidence.