A legitimately one-sided story
Page B1 of today's News Sentinel carries a "Reporter's Notebook" article which recounts several distinct vignettes from the trial of Editor Jack McElroy's lawsuit against Knox County Commission. The printed version of the article is broken into discrete sections, each treating a completely different subject. The online version, however, is somewhat confusing because the subheadings have been omitted; this makes it read like one big article, when it clearly isn't.
The article is entitled "Commission's testimony reveals contradictions;" if one were to read the online version only, that title would imply that the entire article is about contradictions in testimony, when in fact that only applies to the first half of the text.
These contradictions have happened over the span of several weeks, in which a County Commissioner's testimony contradicted testimony given by another commissioner weeks earlier. The article does a good job of connecting these widely dispersed dots; I'm sure there are probably a lot more contradictions to be mined from the testimony of the previous weeks, but it's good to have at least some of them pointed out in such a clear and concise way.
That's compelling stuff.
After the contradictions in testimony, the article goes on to describe the "gentleman's agreement" as a mechanism for picking replacement commissioners, Mark Cawood's credentials (or lack thereof) to work as a court security officer, and a back-hallway deliberation involving one of Tim Hutchison's buddies.
All of these tales paint a consistently negative portrait of County Commission; if a similar article were structured this way and written on any other topic, I'd immediately criticize it for being biased and one-sided. However, it's an unfortunate fact of life in Knox County that the portrait painted by the article is terribly, tragically accurate. I can't really fault the article for presenting only a consistently negative picture of County Commission, since that is the reality of our local government, and it's proven to be the reality of the evidence and testimony presented in this trial.
Sometimes things really are one-sided; when they are, it's legitimate to report them that way.