Welcome to the 12th year of selecting our annual list of the year's most overhyped and underreported stories. As usual, there's plenty to unravel: stories that should never have been stories, stories whose reporting largely missed the point, and stories barely told at all in mainstream US media.

First, the national list; the local Seattle list follows.

The Year's Most Overhyped Stories:

The Democrats Want to Stop the War: In 2006, the top overhyped story was "The Democrats Will Make Everything Better." This year, nobody was bothering to claim that the Democrats would stop the war--that would mess up their plans for the 2008 election--but every time Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or any of the top presidential candidates opened their mouths, there was way too much credulous stenography that Democrats want this war to end. There is, alas, a large body of evidence to the contrary. It's called the Congressional Record.

Speaking of presidential candidates, it's still only 2007 but The 2008 presidential race was already one of the year's most overhyped stories. Look: we know (or at least hope) that Bush is leaving office. In all likelihood a Democrat will replace him. (For the sake of argument, we'll call Hillary Clinton a Democrat.) Does it matter which one? A bit, but not to the point where every gesture at a fundraising dinner in small town Iowa is national news. Last April. Even worse: the endless polls, which mean absolutely nothing until about a week out. Special citation also to "Will Al Gore Run?," a record number of words based on nothing more than wishful thinking.

Iran's nuclear program: All year, Washington claimed Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Iran claimed it was not. Who should the press corps believe? Nobody in the American media even bothered to ask the question. Never mind that Bush and his cronies have never, in seven years, been shown not to be lying when it comes to trying to demonize a country they want to invade. Sure enough: turns out that in 2005, several top Iranian defectors to the US told the Bushies, from firsthand knowledge, that Iran's nuclear weapon program was shut down in 2003 and not restarted--and that for over a year Dick Cheney's office suppressed a National Intelligence Estimate that said as much, while Bush blithely invoked "World War III." This is beyond overhyped: Bush et al brazenly lied--in service of another desired illegal and catastrophic war--US media bought it, and since the bald-faced lie was exposed a few weeks ago, nobody has much cared.

The escalation "surge" is working: Speaking of bald-faced lies ... We started hearing this within minutes of the deployment of additional troops last January. Even then, media were happy to jump on the hype train. Now that there's a lull in US soldier deaths (though not in the chaos in Iraq or the gridlocked political rivalries there), it's conventional wisdom.

The menace of immigration: You'd never know it, but statistically, immigrants (legal or otherwise) are less likely to commit violent crimes or obtain state services fraudulently than white folks. You'd never know it because no cable news network has given a Native American a nightly program to call for the deportation of all white folks.

Barry Bonds and steroids in baseball: Look, we know: steroids are nasty. Cheating in sports sucks. But: This almost all happened years ago; steroids weren't illegal in baseball then; and Bonds in particular has been marquee news (and prosecution fodder) not because of his misdeeds, but because he's black, surly, and (with or without chemical enhancement) the best player of his and perhaps any other generation.

Lifestyles of the Rich and (To Hear Them Tell It) Fuckable: Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie. Coming soon: Hannah Montana. More people in the United States know and care about Paris Hilton's criminal transgressions than George Bush's criminal transgressions. Kind of sums it up, huh?

The Year's Most Underreported Stories

Impeachable Crimes: While Paris whined and Britney shaved, George Bush was busy committing, and freely admitting to committing, a host of impeachable crimes. Lying us into war. Torture. Warrantless surveillance. Destroying evidence. Corruption. He could literally be charged with dozens of types of crimes; his violations of the Constitution and of his oath of office are innumerable. Half of America not only knows this, but wants him and all his furry little friends impeached for exactly that reason--and to ensure that his crimes don't become precedent for any successor. But you'd never know any of this from media coverage, which, in its timidity and "he said, she said" evasion, can never acknowledge a lie as a lie or a crime as a crime. Instead such actions are "controversial," "disputed," "questionable," and so on. You have to wonder how much of America would want these people impeached if our media were simply honest in its use of language.

Bush scandals: Meanwhile, there've been so many lesser scandals (some well reported, many not) that they're all blurring together, and editors and audiences are simply tuning out. Simple solution: Just throw the bastards out of office already.

New Orleans: Bush's biggest domestic scandal was an ongoing story in 2007, with corruption, cronyism, and profiteering crippling efforts by New Orleans to rebuild. Despite (or because of) promises of federal assistance, two years out much of New Orleans still looks like a war zone. But national media moved on.

The Many Plights of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans: Homelessness. Divorce. Domestic violence, violent crime. Record PTSD and suicide rates. Miserable health care and support systems. The VA system a catastrophe. By almost every measure, returning vets are in worse shape from Bush's follies than perhaps vets of any war since 1865. And Bush has slashed spending on services from the overwhelmed agencies that are supposed to help. Of this war's many costs, this one will be with us for many, many decades. Credit where due: Nationally, the Seattle Times is one of the few media outlets that has devoted significant resources to this story. ABC News is another. That's about it.

Civilian death and misery in Iraq: Between the escalation "surge" is working hype and American media's exclusionary fixation on American casualties, the American public rarely hears or considers much about the real victims of this war: Iraqi civilians. The numbers are staggering: over a million dead. Over four million displaced refugees (one of every six surviving Iraqis). Many more whose lives have been destroyed. Maybe, if a few dozen people die at one time, we hear about it. But the sheer terror that is Life In Hell, circa Iraq 2007, is simply beyond the imagination of most Americans. And it's way too much of a downer for corporate media to want to burden our delicate sensibilities. We might get too depressed (or angry) to shop.

Everything else about Iraq: For the biggest story of the year (the war itself), how is it we hear so little about our 14 new (and illegal) permanent bases, the monstrous new embassy, the horrific working standards of the foreign (and in some cases slave) labor used to build it, the endemic corruption, the billions of American dollars missing, the criminality of almost every Iraqi leader allied with America? The list is nearly inexhaustible. The problem is that no mainstream US reporters have the knowledge or guts to venture outside Greenzonistan, the tiny, completely isolated (but no longer very safe) country based on faith and money and located, like the Vatican, in the heart of a much bigger, wholly unrelated country called Iraq.

You do know that the US bombed and helped invade Somalia this year, right?

Say, where is Osama bin Laden, anyway? [Formally retired as a Permanently Underreported Story after six consecutive years on this list.]

Pakistan: General President Musharraf's troubles have made the news, sure. But the context hasn't--specifically, that the dictator's rule is wholly illegitimate, that he was put in power and remains in power thanks to US support (and billions in military aid), and that every Islamist and advocate for democracy in Pakistan knows this, immensely complicating any chances that we will ever win any further friends in that part of the world. It's almost like they don't want bin Laden to be caught.

Speaking of which: Much of the so-called "Global War on Terror" is all about power and profiteering. Neocons wanted an empire abroad and expanded state power at home, sure. But wherever the US military has gone in the last six years, which pretty much resembles a map of Planet Earth, privatization and lucrative contracts for well-connected companies have followed. Much of the logic of this so-called war is economic and intended to benefit only a very, very select few. While the threat posed by terror is real (especially in the wake of post-9-11 American policy), it's been exaggerated endlessly for purely political purposes, a fact so obvious no network talking head dares utter it. There are other far larger threats to this country's national security. Global warming, for one.

America's massive budget and foreign trade deficits, for another. Media has done little to enlighten us on just how badly the Bush regime has bankrupted our country's treasury for generations to come, and left our economy in the hands of foreign creditors like China and Japan. The subprime fiasco is now a fully international banking crisis, the flow of US jobs overseas resembles whitewater rapids, and the value of the dollar is plummeting.

Economic news--at least the kind that matters to the majority of Americans, as opposed to stock prices--is almost never reported honestly in this country. Maybe it's because those network news anchors don't have to worry about household budgets in quite the same way you or I do. This year's Exhibit A: The ripple effect of high oil prices on the economy. It's not just about the cost of gas (hard as that is for some folks). Been in a supermarket lately? Food costs a hell of a lot more than it did a year ago. So does every other staple of an average person's life: housing, medical care, transportation, clothing. But since Brian Williams has people who buy his food for him, it's not a story.

The danger of taking drugs: Not the illicit kind, but the ones that we're supposed to ask our doctor about. In particular, a rash of anti-depressants and other psych pills have turned out to inspire suicide or otherwise have, um, problematic side effects the Bush FDA, aka Big Pharma's Pet Poodle, preferred to ignore until the bodies and lawsuits started piling up. Oddly, even though tens of millions of Americans take these pills and the drug companies have taken some huge hits this year, it's been mostly a non-story. Particularly on those network news programs with nightly "Your Health" features jammed with Pharma ads. Coincidence? You decide.

Thanks to Sicko, we finally (about 15 years too late) started getting coverage of America's health care delivery system and how fucked up it is. But the fact that a majority of Americans know what the solution is and, according to poll after poll, want it, continues to be ignored. There's still one phrase that dare not speak its name in corporate media reports: Universal Health Care. Not the everyone-must-buy-overpriced-and-underperforming-insurance health coverage schemes now being popularized in Massachusetts and California, mind you: a genuine, single-payer insurance system, of the sort used in one or another variation by every other industrialized country in the world.

(Side note: I was in Japan recently to speak at a conference, and my hosts were extremely, persistently solicitous about my health. After several days of this, I finally found out why. They'd all seen Sicko.)--Geov Parrish

Seattle Media Follies

First, the overhyped:

Amanda Knox: If ever there were a case of misplaced sympathy for hometown girl, here it is. Knox, in the unlikely case you missed it, is the party girl accused of helping rape and butcher her roommate at a foreign student program in Italy. The unusually gruesome murder has earned Knox nicknames in the Italian press like "La Luciferina." Here, the coverage, dripping with sympathy, is about a scared local girl in a foreign prison. I've yet to see a profile locally of the British victim. This is a double winner: not only overhyped, but in the dominant local story angle, truly morally repellant.

The Oklahoma City Sonics.

Car crashes, fires, violent crimes, sports, big (and not-so-big) weather "events," heartwarming stories of photogenic, plucky survivors (preferably kids) overcoming adversity, and every other staple of Chuckle-Buddy News.

School Board bashing: It's over now. Really. Because it worked. All year, the daily papers foamed at the mouth about how irresponsible and bad the Seattle School Board was. Sure enough, none of the four reform candidates elected four years ago are still on the board after November's election, which was exactly the point of this coverage. (The Times was particularly noxious on this score.) The reform board actually did a pretty good job with the fiscal disaster they inherited, but they weren't part of the Old Boy/Gal network that previously ran the schools, and that still runs the dailies. That was the board members' biggest sin. After a year of persistent smears, they're all out, and the old guard is back in control. Brace yourself.

Housing hype: Until recently, Seattle media spent the whole year ostentatiously celebrating the fact that unlike the rest of the country, our housing prices continued to spiral upwards out of control. And I do mean celebrate: this was uniformly covered as good news, despite its obvious impact on the renters and would-be home buyers that are a majority of Seattle's population. The editors who assign these stories, most of whom probably own property that was appreciating nicely, showed a singular lack of understanding (or concern) as to how the rest of us outside their social circle live.

The year's most underreported stories:

Condo conversions and the loss of affordable housing: Even as the local housing market has (finally) collapsed, rental prices are actually still going up. Why? Supply and demand. So many once-affordable apartments were turned into condos by speculating owners this year, a record number, that there's very few affordable choices left for renters in Seattle. Why hasn't this been a huge story? See above.

South Lake Union development gifts: From dedicated utilities to a doubling of height limits to the recently opened SLUT (aka The Streetcar Named Paul Allen's Desire), it was a banner year for gifts to Seattle's Oldest Teenager from our development-happy mayor and city council, and little of it attracted local attention. I sure hope Allen was gracious enough to send a bottle of something nice to City Hall this holiday season. He can afford it.

Darcy Burner's Internet fundraising forces out Tom: There were two people running to oppose Dave Reichert in next year's Eastside congressional race. Then George Bush came to town for a Reichert fundraiser in August and Burner used the occasion to raise over $125,000 in one weekend on the Internet, all from small donors. She actually outraised Bush's visit for Reichert, once expenses were deducted. And a few days later her primary opponent dropped out and endorsed her. It was a nationally unprecedented display of the grassroots potential of the Internet for raising money and wielding power, and in local political circles it was an earthquake. In local media? Barely a ripple.

WTO Protesters Get $1 Million in Damages From City: Why? Because police beat the crap out of them and arrested them without justification. This, of course, is the exact opposite of the narrative local media gave us in 1999, which is perhaps why they didn't much dwell on it in 2007.

Joint Operating Agreement holds: The Seattle Times went to court a few years ago to (not to put too fine a point on it) force the P-I out of business. They got their briefs handed to them; the P-I is not only sticking around, but after years of plummeting circulation (based in part on the perception that they'd fold sooner or later), they're actually ahead of the Times now in online readership. Big story, right? Not in the dailies, which can't write about themselves quite so honestly, and not in radio or TV, which doesn't want to acknowledge competitors. You had to go to the Stranger or the blogosphere to know why one of Seattle's major civic institutions was sticking around, or that Times owner Frank Blethen, after years of bellowing about family ownership and the need to protect media diversity, had his attempt at a local monopoly smacked down hard.

Sleaze at the Port of Seattle. A perennial. Likely to get worse in 2008 with Alec Fisken voted off the Port Commission due to a challenger heavily financed by business interests cozy with the Port.

There's more, of course. There always is. Send us your nominations (editorial@eatthestate.org) and we'll run a follow-up addendum next month! Meantime, read carefully in 2008, and rely on multiple sources. You'll come away knowing a lot more about how our city and world work--and what you can do to change things in 2008.