I won't try to stetch your newspaper analogy.

If we don't show the yucky stuff then most of our visitors won't realize there is any yucky stuff. And so they'll be more likely to ask the same yucky question that they've never seen.

I said "most" not "all". If you feel comfortable front-paging a node, then do it. If you don't, then don't. Some yucky questions should be front-paged (so the FP stays somewhat representative of the site and so the majority of our audience see that we do get yucky questions and how we handle them and how we sometimes handle them badly), but it is nice if not all of the lowest-quality questions get front-page.

Sometimes a run of near-duplicate questions should all be front-paged (for all of the same reasons).

I still say that this boils down to "most". I feel that more than half of our SoPW threads on an average day are of reasonable quality and should be front-paged just because they don't suck. I believe that some of the other less-than-half should be front-paged in order to show some of the bad for any number of reasons (as examples, because they were bad in one way but good in another, just for variety).