Last week I speculated that McClatchy would be one of the suitors looking to buy the N&R. With that in mind, The Meck Deck’s Jeff Taylor noticed interesting editing in McClatchy publications involving the below-mentioned racially-charged South Carolina primary:

While the entire Western world ruminated on comments made by BET founder and Charlotte Bobcats owner Robert Johnson in Columbia on Sunday, McClatchy downplayed Johnson’s broadside directed at Barack Obama.

…..This could not happen by accident. Instead, it has all the hallmarks of skipping over something embarrassing so as not to make a prominent local figure look bad. There is also danger in drawing attention to a racially charged topic in which there is no “safe” place for a liberal to land. Agree with Johnson, Obama’s camp and chunks of the civil right movement is angry. Dismiss Johnson, you got Hillary, Johnson, the labor movement and the poverty industry mad at you.

Turns out I noticed a little something about McClatchy newspapers myself over the weekend. Seems like the last two times I’ve gone to Raleigh (to visit my sainted mother), I’ve picked up the N&O and they’re pushing mass transit for the Raleigh area. Friday’s lead editorial says:

As far as they go, new proposals for mass transit in the traffic-choked Triangle are fine. It’s just that they don’t go far enough. Bus service would be ramped up and some passenger rail service might finally be offered. But ideas now surfacing seem to lack an integrated vision of how best to deal with transit challenges across six counties……

Meanwhile, new approaches such as streetcars and curb-guided busways are on the table. Such improvements are bound to be expensive, but given the importance of good transit options to the region’s economy and quality of life, this will not be the time to scrimp.

….while Saturday’s edition follows up with this story on the model for mass transit in Charlotte, which just happens to be another McClatchy city:

The Triangle can afford to expand bus service and build new rail projects if local leaders make a “Charlotte level of effort,” the head of a regional transit agency said Friday.

A new half-cent local sales tax could augment local and state transit funds to pay for 150 new buses in the next few years and launch more than $1 billion worth of capital projects by 2020, said David King, general manager of the Triangle Transit Authority.

I realize it is indeed a fact that Charlotte’s light rail line is the “model” for mass transit in North Carolina. I also realize that newspaper editors and reporters everywhere never see a mass transit project they don’t like. But is it not a little too coincidental that one McClatchy newspaper is pushing a project that another McClatchy newspaper vigorously supported?

This is what Greensboro readers might look for should McClatchy end up with the N&R. Couldn’t get much worse, though. In yesterday’s print edition, B2 had Robinson’s column, Ahearn’s jump, the Savvy Shopper jump and a half-page ad. Not exactly a wealth of hard news.