Great article by Kinsley on the excessive wordage in newspaper writing:

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.
[…]
Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype–it’s horse-race hype–which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it.
[…]
Something similar happens at the national level, where everything is filtered through politics. (“In what was widely seen as a setback for Democrats just a year before the midterm elections, nuclear bombs yesterday obliterated seven states, five of which voted for President Obama in the last election …”)

He gives plenty of examples in the article but I suggest you read this NY Times piece on Harry Reid as a follow up. I couldn’t finish it because it was way too long, about halfway through my interest in the point of the article (was the author writing a hit piece or not) waned. Reid is just not that interesting and quoting him only makes it worse.