Saturday's front page of The New York Times, a.k.a. "the paper of record," led with the following two stories. First, Lee R. Raymond, former chairman and chief executive of Exxon-Mobile, was paid $144,573 for each day that he spent leading Exxon over 13 years. Next, hundreds of immigrants across the country, including legal immigrants in Wisconsin, lost their jobs because they took the day off last week to protest proposed immigration reform.

The International section of Saturday's Times ran six pages of stories. Some of the stories, not necessarily the more important ones, reported: "Chad broke off relations with Sudan on Friday and threatened to oust 200,000 Sudanese refugees;" an American military officer was handing out $35 in an Afghan market to anyone willing to sell computer flash drives; nine Iraqi officers and two Marines died in an ambush just north of Baghdad "after being denied permission to stay overnight on an American military base;" the Bush administration has asked Congress to approve $85 million for a state department project headed by one of Dick Cheney's daughters designed to shake up Iran's political system; and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that Israel was on the verge of "being eliminated."

Madison's paper of record, The Wisconsin State Journal, had five stories on Saturday's front page. The lead headline, "Super Foods," was a Knight Ridder Newspapers story discussing foods that can help keep people healthy. Column two, an Associated Press story, reporting that an all-white Milwaukee jury acquitted three white former police officers on four charges but remained hung on a fifth charge, involving a 2004 incident of alleged police brutality against a bi-racial man.

The bottom half of the page had three stories by State Journal employees. The first was a profile of Victor Montero-Diaz, the man killed by Madison police officers last week on Willy Street. Next was a report that Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager and Governor Jim Doyle said that they would return $35,000 in donations from two Illinois business leaders. The last was a "story" that Madison police released an image of the pipe-bomb suspect.

Relying on the Times and The Wisconsin State Journal, the world might not seem to be in such a sour state: A few dead here and there, police officers in Milwaukee and Madison are not abusing their authority, people who take off from work to protest can get fired, politicians do have a conscious, the military is smart enough to try to recover "lost" sensitive military information, and the American dream of making over $140,000 a day is alive and well.

Too bad these reports aren't the complete stories.

Newspapers know that most Americans are like me and get sick to their stomachs after reading story after story of the thousands killed in Iraq and the hundreds of thousands killed in the Darfur region. Americans have a reputation for being soft — and tyrants throughout the world are betting that American newspapers won't print how many people are really dying in Iraq or that the U.S. government is silently watching 500 men, women and children in the Darfur region die each day.

Newspapers know that Americans want to feel good about themselves after reading their paper — so they print stories about police being justified in severely beating up a guy in Milwaukee or how killing a mentally ill man in Madison was the right thing to do. Americans want to read that spending five dollars for blueberries is worth it because "super foods" might make them healthier.

Americans don't want to read how the largest oil company in the world is probably screwing its own people. Or that the world probably intervened in Kosovo because Europeans and not Africans were killing each other.

James Madison's words, not mine, are perhaps more important today than ever.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Most likely, those in charge are just scared that if they educate the masses, their leadership powers will be exposed as nothing more than scare-tactics; the vehicle of tyrants and dictators. Yet coming clean is really the government's best option — if Americans are going to trust their president, the president is going to need to trust Americans. Either way, it is time for the Bush administration to stop spoon-feeding the public only one side of the story.

Jason Saltoun Ebin ([email protected]) is a second-year law student.