Sure, ideally you should dig deep. I did that on a lot of the minimum wage papers and discovered just how deceptive and misleading they were trying to be - mostly using carefully crafted data and assumptions which were patently unrealistic. Sometimes they would smother those wrong assumptions with incredibly elaborate math.

Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).

Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.