It’s a holiday season

tradition! Here is my list of overhyped and underreported local stories of the year. As usual, there’s no shortage of candidates — add your own! And as always, here’s to better local news coverage in 2013.

Most overhyped

•The Sonics are not about to come back — Another new arena got approved this year, largely on the offer of the owner to pay a lot of the costs if Seattle can attract new NBA and NHL teams. The thing is, very few pro sports teams move, several other cities are also competing for teams and no city in the history of North American pro sports has attracted teams from two leagues in the same generation — never mind in the same year or two.

On the delusion that Seattle is somehow different, widely repeated in local media, a pricy, new arena would now be built in Sodo.

•Microsoft, home of lousy software — Time after time, a Microsoft acquisition or product launch is treated to the sort of fawning local coverage that is probably produced directly by Redmond’s PR people.

This year, it’s Windows 8, which entirely abandons the PC market for tablets and mobile devices and has been universally panned in the trade press — not that you’d know it from the local stenography.

Objective coverage of Microsoft’s loss of its innovative edge would be genuinely interesting. But that’s not what we get — ever.

•The banning of plastic bags in Seattle last July has not, oddly enough, been the end of the world heralded by American Chemical Association stooges. Most people took it right in stride.

Plus, as usual, car crashes; fires; violent (and potentially violent) crimes; big (or not) weather “events”; heartwarming stories of photogenic, plucky kids overcoming adversity or reuniting with pets…. Every time you watch local TV news, it lowers your IQ by two points.

Most

underreported

•McGinn and the City of Seattle are still in denial about SPD — From dragging his feet on settling a pending Department of Justice lawsuit, to trying to sneak in a toothless civilian overseer, Mayor Mike McGinn and his cronies have consistently refused to acknowledge that the Department of Justice and tens of thousands of non-white Seattle residents might have a point: The cops take cues from their leaders, and the routine and not-so-routine abuses continue.

And now the Seattle Police Department is adding drones. Feel safer?

•Not that KCSO is much better — A lawsuit by former King County Sheriff’s Office deputies and employees alleges rampant sexual harassment,

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