In the New York pages of today’s New York Times you’ll find a terrific story about a Cuban bicyclist named Damian Lopez Alfonso, who hasn’t let his handicaps (no arms) stop him from becoming a competitive racer. As the Times style requires, the story refers to him as Mr. Alfonso.

Had this story appeared in another logical location — the sports pages — the “Mr.” would have been removed. This is also a requirement of the Times’ style guide.

The Times mandates courtesy titles (Mr., Ms., etc.) only in news stories, though it drops them for some dead people and those it arbitrarily considers evil enough not to deserve them. For example, Osama Bin Laden lost his Mr. after US forces killed him in May. But Saddam Hussein was recently still being called Mr. Hussein, as Slate notes.

Entertainers get honorifics in the Times, so you’ll read stories about the Rolling Stones you’ll see references to Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards. (The Times reviewer of this Meat Loaf concert apparently couldn’t bring himself to writing the laugh-out-loud “Mr. Loaf,” and just used “Meat Loaf” throughout.)

Athletes — at least those deemed newsworthy by the Times — are entertainers, too. The make lots of money. They take lots of drugs. They get arrested. Oh, they perform. But no honorifics for them.

The Wall Street Journal used to be consistent. But in a recent move that was semi-lampooned even by its own columnist, it opted to drop the honorifics for stories in the sports section. The logic for the move? None, apart from the notion that it somehow sounded better, or at least less ridiculous, to just go with last names.

These policies aren’t just inconsistent. They’re incoherent.

They’re also a quaint vestige of a dying era, when the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the vanishingly small number of other papers that do this actually believed they were showing respect for the people they covered. (Except for supremely evil people and athletes, who obviously deserve none.) Did the papers self-enforced civility (except for athletes and people deemed supremely evil) may actually have had an impact on the journalists’ work, or on the perception of the newspapers that had this policy?

But respect is in short enough supply in our society. There’s nothing wrong with honorifics, if they’re used consistently. The incoherent policies at the Times and Journal don’t demonstrate respect for the people they cover when they deliberately omit courtesy titles for a single class of people in specific pages; rather, they demonstrate disrespect.

So many things are disappointing about the FCC’s just-released future of media report that it’s tempting to write it off entirely. That would be a mistake.

Shallowness in research isn’t one of the problems. No one can accuse the working group (PDF), headed by Steve Waldman and 18 months in the making, of not doing some serious homework, with interviews, hearings and data collection.

A few traditional news organizations were favored with embargoed copies of the report ahead of time (Exhibit A of the problem), though after reading their articles I’m not sure if they did much more than skim it. In any event, my quick comments here — I hope to do more later on — are based on a fast read-through of the report, which bizarrely appears to be available on the FCC website only as a collection of PDFs, with no HTML version (Exhibit B). Happily, lots of folks, including Josh Stearns from the media reform organization Free Press, have posted it as an embeddable a Scribd document.

My initial reaction, as suggested at the top, is puzzlement at the working group’s missed opportunities.

The report’s main takeaway, from what I can see, is that local news is declining. That’s true, in part. No one can dispute the massive disinvestment in journalism by local newspapers and broadcasters in recent years. The rise of hyperlocal news has helped fill some gaps, but there’s no question that fewer paid journalists — at least ones working for organizations that try to provide news to the general public — are paying attention to local and state governments than before.

The report largely stays away from what many observers, including me, had feared. It does not ask for major government intervention in news. Whew. At the hearing where I spoke, more than a few people wanted just that kind of recommendation.

But there’s a caveat: It suggests steering what could ultimately be more than $1 billion in annual federal advertising spending (for such things as military recruitment) away from big media organizations to smaller, local ones. The can of worms this will open is fairly large, not least the political favoritism that is certain to pick winners in such a process. I guarantee, if this goes anywhere, that the dollars will flow to the companies that have the most clout on K Street, not the new media organizations that are doing the hardest work now to fill the gaps.

The report’s subtitle, “The changing media landscape in a broadband age,” highlights my biggest disappointment — its lack of serious recommendations regarding the real and growing broadband problem in the U.S. The authors insist that “Universal broadband and an open Internet are essential prerequisites for ensuring that the new media landscape serves communities well,” but their recommendations are utterly vague on how we can get there.

In Mediactive, I wrote that only one major government intervention makes sense:

only one that wouldn’t put government meddling squarely into the practice of journalism—an inevitable result of the direct subsidies being pushed by well-meaning but misguided media thinkers. It’s a subsidy for bandwidth: getting true broadband Internet access to as many people as possible, as some other nations in Europe and Asia have done.

The precedent in this case is the right one. Taxpayer-assisted infrastructure—especially the postal system and low rates for sending publications—helped create the newspaper business, and enabled a lot of other commerce. Let’s bring that logic forward to the early 21st century, and enable high-speed Internet access for all Americans, and a communications infrastructure for all competitors.

I’m not surprised that this idea went nowhere, just disappointed.

From what I can tell, the report gives short shrift to network neutrality, or rules guaranteeing users’ rights to select the media they want, not the media to which the broadband providers and their commercial partners want to give priority. The suggestion that new wireless services will solve the problem by adding competition is at best wishful thinking.

Maybe the working group is just recognizing reality. America’s leaders have made it clear that they do not consider it a taxpayer issue to ensure broadband access; they’ve stood by while the U.S. slides dramatically in world rankings of the most-connected nations. And they’ve increasingly shown hostility to the vital need for rules to ensure that average citizens, not corporate America, can make their own decisions. The journalism ecosystem of the future utterly depends on connectivity and net neutrality. Paying lip service to these notions doesn’t help.