By Denise Tessier

A friend once complained heartily to me that the Albuquerque Journal wasn’t worth reading because it didn’t have enough national news. I disagreed on the grounds local papers should focus on local news – anything national was gravy.

Lack of national news could be a moot point today, when local news can be easily complemented online, and it should be clearer to readers like my friend that local news coverage is the key to local news organizations’ survival. Furthermore, some might argue that the Journal does a pretty good job fitting in national news, considering the scarcity of its pages.

But because it does offer up national news, what the Journal chooses to leave out in itself reveals a bias, as my colleague Arthur Alpert deftly pointed out here.

And sometimes, these national-news based Journal stories are so short they actually leave the wrong impression, as happened with recent skewed coverage of the U.S. Postal Service’s report.

Using Journal national news stories as a jump off, I offer up both bite-size and larger course stories that recently caught my eye , with links to more in-depth coverage, found elsewhere, for readers to savor:

Outrageously Invading Privacy

Wednesday’s Journal Business section front (March 13) carried a two-paragraph story saying New Mexico will get about $110,000 as part of a $7 million settlement reached after Google admitted it intercepted passwords and other sensitive information sent over unprotected wireless networks worldwide. The Journal story came from the state Attorney General’s office.

To get a better idea just how outrageous Google’s actions were — as its agents drove through private neighborhoods, taking over-the-fence photographs of people’s yards, windows and doorways (great for would-be burglars) — read Wednesday’s lead New York Times article on the resulting court settlement. It’s a settlement that has all the appearances of being, for Google, a “small price to pay.”

For a more detailed history of Google’s predatory actions, here’s a complementary take from the Homeland Security News Wire.

Getting Away With Military Sexual Assault

This topic’s been hot enough to garner two national stories in the Journal in a week, both of which garnered much more Journal space than a two-paragraph brief. The back of the A section Sunday (March 10) carried Washington Post coverage of an Air Force general’s decision to overturn a fighter pilot’s sexual assault conviction. The story said the general ordered the pilot’s release from prison and “tossed out his conviction without explanation.”

That decision came up again a few days later when a Senate panel convened to hear “harrowing” testimony from victims of  sexual assault in the military, and the Journal carried the Associated Press account of the panel’s Defense Department scrutiny over a quarter of the page on C3.

For truly harrowing, first-person evidence that a culture of rape, sexual assault and harassment has infected the military, check out “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer” in Rolling Stone.

Yet Another Paul Ryan ‘Plan’

Meet the new plan, same as the old unworkable plan – only this time proposed to gut health and education programs in even less time.

The Journal carried a balanced account from Bloomberg News of Paul Ryan’s latest congressional time-wasting budget proposal, placing it top center on a page in the A section, with a photo of Ryan (March 13). But I wonder how many readers viewed the Journal headline – “Ryan unveils GOP plan to erase deficit within decade” – without skepticism, reading no further.

Unfortunately, the release of such “plans” is news and can’t be ignored (by national media, anyway), but to relegate the story to a couple of graphs arguably would have been worse, because it likely would have left out the ”balance” of the story, such as these lines:

The plan, which is similar to previous iterations of Ryan’s budgets, will surely be dead on arrival in the Senate. . .

And:

It will set up yet another budget battle in Washington, where lawmakers are deadlocked over what to do about $85 billion in automatic budget cuts. . .

It’s unlikely the Journal or its plethora of conservative columnists will find an iota of  fault with Ryan’s budget, so I offer this New York Times editorial, of the opinion that the latest plan is Ryan’s worst so far. And here’s a link to a story about a House Budget Committee member who, like Ryan, is trumpeting a federal balanced budget as the Holy Grail in terms of the nation’s future. But this House member, it turns out, runs his personal small  business with massive debt. It’s the kind of story one doesn’t find in so-called corporate media.

So, the last line of this ThinkProgress story bears reprinting here:

The federal economy is fundamentally different from household budgets and economic data and history suggest that the government should be spending more, not less given the current economic circumstances.

For more support of that statement, check out Josh Barro’s blog at Bloomberg News. “Nuns on the Bus” (the Catholic social justice lobby) don’t like Ryan’s plan either.