The Washington Post's Continuing Death Spiral

This is a media rant. I'm not one of those people who are constantly berating the media (the so-called "mainstream media") for their failings. However, for quite a while I've been watching the spiraling downward of the Washington Post coverage of international affairs. But today they hit a new low.

The Saturday, August 22, edition of the Post contains not a single article -- count 'em, zero -- on anything relating to the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, or the ongoing crisis in Iran.

By way of contrast, the New York Times carried a page one piece on the aftermath of the election in Afghanistan, a lead piece in its international section on the Iranian crisis, focusing on President Ahmadinejad's problems in assembling a Cabinet for his second term, and a lengthy piece sorting out the pieces left over from the enormous bombings that devastated downtown Baghdad on Wednesday.

These three pieces are not fluff either, but hard news stories contained information that the Post simply ignored.

It gets worse. The Post did manage to scrounge up a story on the release of the Lockerbie bomber to Libya, but the entirety of the story focused on U.S. and British outrage over the release, which Obama called "highly objectionable." The Times carried a far longer piece that actually reported the news, namely, that British observers and analysts are making concrete charges that London supported the freeing of the prisoner in order to facilitate oil deals with Libya. In contrast to the Post, which contented itself with regurgitating official outrage that a terrorist is once again loose, the Times piece, by John F. Burns, had this gem:

On Friday, Lord Trefgarne, chairman of the Libyan British Business Council, said Mr. Megrahi's release had opened the way for Britain's leading oil companies to pursue multibillion-dollar oil contracts with Libya, which had demanded Mr. Megrahi's return in talks with British officials and business executives.