It's propaganda designed to create a mental state in the reader, namely that the US is great. We don't print the text of national hymns in our newspapers, we just print nearly every silly or bad thing that happens in any other country, even in the midst of much more significant/abhorrent conduct by our own government.
It's propaganda and nothing more. It's useful both for distraction and dehumanization.
And I suppose if we only printed things about our own country you'd probably castigate the US for arrogantly ignoring the rest of the world. Or that if other countries report on American corruption and social problems, it's not equally an attempt at deflecting from their own issues? Maybe we should only print positive news about others and negative news about ourselves?
I think your definition of "news" is basically this kind of story...
As a thought experiment, imagine if American readers of the "world news" section routinely were led to think things like "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if our policymakers tried that idea" or "wow, maybe the people in country x are just like me and deserve my profound respect, even though my country is launching missiles into their neighborhoods".
Illegal immigrants are dehumanized in the American press too, as are sex workers. The point of creating psychological/empathic distance between the reader and the subject is to permit the reader to suppress the basic reflex of valuing human life. Imagine the news story about an illegal immigrant sex worker who was found murdered.
