Andrew Keyes

Two columns at Pyjamas Media caught my attention this morning regarding the increasingly sorry state of reporting we are witnessing from mainstream media.

In the first column Carol Gould writes about the current issue of Newsweek which features a cover story titled “Obama on Obama”. Yes, that would the same Newsweek that last month named Steven Colbert a guest editor for one of it’s issues.

As I write this British soldiers are being killed on a daily basis in Afghanistan in an alarming spike in the power of the Taliban. All manner of terror organizations are regrouping and Pakistan is on the brink of becoming another ninth-century center for mullah mania. So in this context Newsweek says that the president has taken on the automobile industry, the financial sector, and terrorism — in the magazine’s words, “he is the action.”

Meacham says he is delighted that the president remembered something he had written, although he acknowledges that White House staff had briefed him on a Meacham piece moments before the interview. The journalist muses, “I knew he’d remember, or well, he may be faking it with everybody else, but I bet he really did like that piece.” Omigosh! Is he meeting a supermodel on whom he has a midlife crush or what? We even learn about “his voice rising ever so slightly, his head tilting back ever so subtly to a commanding angle.” And we also learn that the president is “Spock with global sex appeal.” Later on Meacham reports that the president gives him a Spock salute. Cute and human, but with the world in turmoil I prefer something of more, well, substance.

The second story, from Todd Bensman, is titled “The Post Submits Its 2009 Entry for ‘Worst Investigative Reporting’”

Suddenly, size matters.

That’s the central conclusion of a lengthy Washington Post article Monday that sought to assess the national security implications of Iran’s 2007 move into leftist Sandinista President Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua.

The newspaper’s badly belated first weigh-in on the Islamic Republic’s most northern presence in the Americas wound up fixating on a curious detail: the physical size of the Iranian embassy there.

Was it a huge mega-embassy, as some U.S. officials have said? A smallish embassy? Something mid-range but perhaps aspiring to be architecturally grandiose?

The Post’s writers, offering no basis for such a wacky thesis, seem to have been guided by their own inexpert, uninformed extrapolation: that the bigger the physical facility, the more serious a threat can be posed. Conversely, the smaller the facility, the slighter the threat.

The Post’s conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly? No “super-embassy.” Therefore, no security threat from the Iranians.

For a more comprehensive tracking of the collapse of mainstream print media, be sure to check out Kate MacMillan’s “Not waiting for the asteroid” posts at Small Dead Animals.