THE AUG. 30 headline on SFGate.com really summed up the state of the news media in the United States today. The Web site of the biggest newspaper in northern California asked the profound question "Who surfed Scott's laptop?"

The story began this way: –"Whoever used Scott Peterson's home computer on the day he said his wife disappeared had decidedly feminine tastes, according to testimony in the double-murder trial this morning."

OK, I'll admit it: The Peterson trial is news. It's a gruesome murder case and a high-stakes trial, and it belongs in the newspapers. (I wish the San Francisco Chronicle paid as much attention to the murders of people who aren't white and to defendants who don't have million-dollar defense lawyers, but, you know, whatever.)

Still, I would go out on a limb here and argue that the gender of the person using Peterson's laptop is not quite as important to the world as, say, the fact that massive and growing wealth inequality in the United States is threatening the economy. Or the fact that the Bush administration is censoring its own scientists. Or the wholesale giveaway of the nation's natural resources.

But you don't see stories like that on the front page of the Chron day after day. If you see them at all, they're buried, presented in a boring way, and treated as of only passing interest.

That's the point of Project Censored, the organization founded by Carl Jensen, a professor at Sonoma State University, in 1976, comes in. The project seeks to point out big stories the mainstream news media ignored or downplayed – and not surprisingly, a lot of this year's winners involve the Bush administration.

The administration is still getting velvet-glove treatment from the national press. Bush's lies, the failures of his policies, and the repressive state he has created are real news, and a real, honest, aggressive media would pursue them day after day after day.

A neat example (beyond the Project Censored list in this issue) is the ongoing controversy over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting points out at sfbg.com, virtually all of the claims of this anti-Kerry group are provably false – and yet very few media outlets have just come out and said that. Daniel Okrent, the New York Times public editor, had the right line: the problem with "balanced" reporting is that some things are just true.

Tim Redmond