`C-h n' broken

I'm not sure if this is Debian-specific, but when I press C-h n, I get "ERC news": ERC NEWS -*- outline -*- * Fixes since ERC 5.0.2 ** Fix typo in the `ctcp-request-to' entry of the English catalog. ** Debugging with edegug has been made easier in all of the erc-with-* and with-erc* macros. ** Non-ASCII character sets should be better supported when sending and processing messages. ... Since I don't even know what "ERC" is, I was unpleasantly surprised by this. I assume the problem is that `view-emacs-news' looks up the NEWS file using `locate-data-file' (which used to be the advertised way of finding such files), but (locate-data-file "NEWS") returns "/usr/share/xemacs21/xemacs-packages/etc/erc/NEWS". This problem will probably recur with other "data files" of the same name in different directories.