thumb-sucker
n.— «For every inane segment on “Dateline” or plodding thumb-sucker on PBS, there is a smart, innovative documentary elsewhere.» —“From One Voice to Many, a New Golden Age of News” by Alessandra Stanley New York Times July 26, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
In 30 years in journalism, I’ve heard this term used with different shades of meaning. Most often it is used to describe an article or column that involved little or no reporting, as though the writer sat in a corner sucking his/her thumb, and this is what he/she came up with. I’ve also heard it used it to describe a boring, relatively pointless story. Another possibility: a story whose factual basis is questionable. But the first definition is the one I heard earliest, and most often since.