phxated_wymanYou’d think a shrinking representative of a dying industry would get its act together and face the future with a coherent plan.

But we’re talking about the Arizona Republic—The Worst Newspaper in the World™.

The front page today is a mystery. The two top stories: A round-up of crazy militiamen in the Midwest and the bombings on the Moscow subway.

Both were day-old news. Neither had anything to do with Arizona. Each was a wire story.

Lower down on the page was real news about something that affects the Valley a lot: The baseball commissioner saying he would help Arizona keep the Chicago Cubs training here. I don’t follow sports, so maybe the reporter, Craig Harris, was playing catchup or something, but it certainly seemed like an original story and that it was a Republic exclusive.

And further down next to it was an actual staff-generated piece played off some national news: How Congress went on vacation without extending jobless benefits.

The story made some attempts to localize the issue. Here’s the lede:

Yet again, thousands of Arizonans are at risk of having their long-term unemployment benefits cut because Congress has not acted on an extension.

And farther down the reporter, Betty Beard, talks to some real live Arizonans who say what you’d expect:

Kris Sullivan, 52, a Phoenix resident and college graduate with sales experience, has been out of work since October 2007. Without an extension, she said the long-term unemployed like herself would be devastated.

The only problem with the story is that it doesn’t tell readers the single most salient issue, which is that the Republicans in the Senate blocked the extension—and which of course just about every other news organization in the country made plain for its readers.

You don’t have to turn it into a GOP-bashing exercise—you could explain that the Republicans said they didn’t want to raise the deficit further.

In fact, you could do that and it would have been a defensible piece, even if it still would have represented half the real story.

(Democrats would say in response that more benefits work as an additional stimulus to the economy, which it needs, and that at any rate the GOP’s concern about the deficit is a fairly new preoccupation for the party after the ruinous Bush years.)

But the question remains: Why did the paper’s editors expend a troubled institution’s resources on writing up a national story that’s demonstrably less informative than just about any wire service account they could have picked up?