Explaining Polly Toynbee

A piece in the Independent (sent to me by MatGB) helps to explain Polly Toynbee’s columns:

Toynbee, whose work often displays a thorough grasp of sociological and policy detail, thinks that a column should contain at least three interesting facts.

Jane Galt (who in her day job writes for The Economist):

(Why must we journalists always have at least three statistics?....But elsewhere, it seems to be some iron law that if you have two examples of something, you must come up with a third, come hell or high water. Let's call it Jane's Law of the Third Supporting Fact.  This leads to the awful temptation to fudge when no good third anecdote data presents itself.