From today’s editorial* celebrating National Newspaper Week, “Newspapers Vital In Informing Public,” in the Wheeling News-Register:

Right here in our communities, newspapers matter because our readers know they can turn to us for the real story, when social media has run amok. They know our reporters will ask the questions – of all sides – for which our readers need the answers. They know that we will not shy away from doing the difficult work to tell the whole story.

The whole story? Just drop down one blog post and see how they’ve covered our local congressional race. The Democratic candidate for Congress, Kendra Fershee, has been featured in just one article since May. One article in five months and even that article, if the commenters are correct, made no effort “to tell the whole story” of what the candidate said when they covered her local town hall.

How about "no story" instead "full story"? This week, one of the biggest news stories nationally and throughout the world has been the United Nations report on climate change. The Associated Press produced a number of insightful stories on the U.N.’s findings like this one:

UN report on global warming carries life-or-death warning

Our local papers have completely ignored the UN story. That’s because, like local election coverage, they are primarily about propagandizing not informing. Except for Fox News, I cannot think of any other news source that must regularly remind us of what a great job they are doing. And like Fox News (it seems to me), it’s a way of compensating for the inadequate and biased reporting that pervades their news coverage.

*Note – no local link – the link is to another Ogden paper that carried the same editorial. Apparently, other Ogden papers do the same “difficult work to tell whole story.”