Yes and to crime/corruption and to the Washington State News topics... the mods remove them and ship these posts off to chat because they know fewer folks will see it and will get less replies.
They do it intentionally to suppress this type of news...
That's interesting
What I've noticed, is there seem to be endless stories about far off places, like Outer Mongolia, 3rd world rebels running around some dusty streets of some obscure trashed country, or Libyan street gangs raping someone...Yet local news, U.S. news, seems to be more scrutinized, monitored and or scrubbed.
Like this news story for instance being put into a chat area, as you said.