There was a story in the Vancouver Sun on March 8 that was interesting for a couple of reasons. There was the item itself, headlined: "Police say they use Tasers on non-violent people".

The admission by Vancouver police that its officers Tasered people who weren't threatening or who were merely being uncooperative when asked to present their hands to be handcuffed is surprising enough in itself. The Vancouver police department is notoriously intransigent when it comes to exposing its wrongdoings or even apologizing for its blunders.

What was most unusual, though, was the placement of the story: the last news page of the B section. A story like this would routinely hit the front page of the Sun, yet this was the very last local news story in the paper that day.

Here was a real cracker of a story, an official admission of the use of an extremely controversial device in a manner inconsistent with the VPD's position: that Tasers are to be used as an alternative to lethal force, i.e., sidearms. Unless we are to believe that Vancouver cops routinely contemplate putting a round in someone who is uncooperative while being cuffed, this showed that position to be the nonsense that most people have always known it to be.

So why did Sun editors bury it deeper than Gordon Campbell's conscience? The reason might lie in the fact that the information from the cops came as the result of a Freedom of Information request. The fact that the police responded to that request on its Web site, for all to see, meant the Sun couldn't run it front-page with an "Exclusive" tag.

So one of the more important local stories of the past few months--and, no, we don't count Vanoc announcements and B.C. Liberal ministerial briefings with pet journalists as important--gets the placement equivalent of being spiked.

After all, the front page is for the earth-shaking stuff, like that same day's story about a senior who had two rings stolen, or today's bit on a spelling-bee winner.