My hometown newspaper is hardly a liberal or conservative rag, as some critics from either side sometimes call it. The San Diego Union-Tribune is a pretty good regional newspaper. Its editorials are mostly middle-of-the-road, maybe conservative only by contrast to some other newspapers. Its op-eds are from a wide range of political viewpoints. Its news columns try to blend newswire stories to achieve more completeness and balance. Yet like most newspapers, it too often fails to meet basic journalistic standards. This can result in unfairness, imbalance or incompleteness, and sometimes in a functional equivalent of bias by failing to present...