Stories the media miss.

• Author: Mintz, Morton
• Position: Underreporting of important stories by 'New York Times,' 'Wall Street Journal,' 'Los Angeles Times,' and 'Washington Post'

The Big Four newspapers neglect important news that affect you directly

Many say they couldn't take another of the endless, lurid dispatches from Tonya Harding's skating rink, or the daily rehashes of John Bobbitt's involuntary loss of a body part. Others say they hate newspapers because they're too negative, tearing down reputations and exploiting victims to make an easy buck. Or the press just doesn't get it right because it's in the bag for somebody--its sources, liberals, whoever.

But as a long-time Washington reporter, I've learned that the great problem of newspaperdom's Gang of Four--The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal--isn't just that they devote too much space to tales of sex, mayhem, and other junk food. Their sin, rather, is omission: the nonreporting, burial, and trivialization of the news that citizens need--and to which they are damn well entitled.

The papers have a sharp eye for stories with zero effect on the lives of ordinary people, stories that sprawl across acres of newsprint and distract reporters from work that's less glitzy and more relevant. The Big Four, for example, almost completely missed the Savings and Loan mess--labeled the "biggest white-collar swindle in history" by then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. And they did a miserable job informing Americans about how a single-payer health plan not only works well in Canada, but would have saved our country hundreds of billions of dollars. Indeed, it's an everyday matter for the press to fail to provide sufficient information about government's successes and failures. Yet this information is crucial to the health of our democracy, and unlike infotainment about Tonya Harding and John Bobbitt, it profoundly affects the average person.

With tax time almost upon us, you may be interested in one example, brought to you by none of the Big Four. In a disturbing report last June 15, the General Accounting Office found that the Internal Revenue Service had a "lack of fundamental record keeping . . . inconsistent with record keeping requirements placed on taxpayers i supporting their returns."

Take two taxpayers who together owed the government $134,000 that the IRS didn't collect while they were getting the multi-million dollar refunds to which they were entitled Without first collecting the $96,000 that on owed, the GAO report declared, the IRS sent him a check for $13.4 million. The second tax payer was even luckier. Before he could pay hi $34,000, the IRS cut him a check for $21.8 mil lion. And the GAO found systematic problems in all the accounts--$5.5 billion worth--on which the IRS does its calculations manually. One taxpayer received a refund of $1,065,303. Later he also received an automated refund, calculated at only $465,995. Had he not returned the second check that money might well have been lost to the government.

In a sampling of 45 manually calculated returns, the IRS "improperly and inconsistently" overcharged or undercharged the interest owed in 16--more than one in three. IRS records showed $58 billion in credits as of Sept. 30, 1993, although its 1993 fiscal year financial statements listed only...