The laziness of journalists is legendary. Especially these days, when the line between journalist and propagandist has been blurred, the many ways in which these scribblers take shortcuts and otherwise seek to make their jobs less strenuous have been greatly increased. While outright plagiarism used to be the favored method, with the advance of technology this has become much easier to detect, and so the self-indulgent scribe has moved on to other, less obvious shortcuts. The substitution of opinion for the reporting of facts is one way to fill up a page, and, in tandem with this, the adoption of a formula is now a mainstay of "mainstream" journalism. This is unashamedly borrowed from those writers of pure fiction who labor in the fields of various sub-literate genres – say, pornography – and must churn out large quantities of product in order to pay the rent. Saddled with a limited imagination, and pressed for time, these third-and –fourth-rate wordsmiths have only to latch on to the time-honored scripts which have been created by their more inventive predecessors: with the plot-lines mapped out in advance, all they have to do is fill in the blanks (background, character names) and – voila! – the job is done.