The WaPo is still a local paper. You can walk over to the newsstand here in Seattle and buy the NY Times and WSJ, but you can't buy a WaPo. Despite its long-time aspriations to be a "national paper of record," it is still, at best, a regional paper whose influence only comes from being the local paper inside the Beltway. The Washington Times has become the conservative paper of record, but even then you can't buy a paper copy anywhere out west. The WaPo's readership is almost entirely within an 80 mile radius of the Capitol. Its clout and capital can allow it to do stories like this (and do them in Okieland rather than rural Virginia without penalty of not doing a "local story"), but its readers are Beltway folks. If it were heavily read on the West Coast, I'd agree with you, but it's simply not. Heck, you can't even get the SF Chronicle or the LA Times in the Northwest, and they're both "major national papers."

The Sunday paper is supposed to be about features and opinion, mainly because it's the only time during the week that the average American has more than 15 minutes to read the paper (unless, like me, you're at church all morning). And I wouldn't call it ALL fluff. The nice thing about the Seattle Times is that they devote eight pages to opinion on Sunday (and the P-I chips in another four). You have 16 pages of arts and music. And there are two Sunday magazine sections. No paper could do that every day due to cost and the time it takes to put magazine sections and multi-part articles together.

I strongly recommend that next Sunday you look at the Newseum's online gallery of front pages around the country:

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/

If you did, you'd see that what the WaPo did is no different that what happens in every other Sunday paper, even the ones that "don't need feature articles."

The Post isn't a typical local paper that needs silly human interest stories on page 1 to sell papers. Indeed, I've never noticed it doing something quite like this before, although I'll keep an eye out. WaPo is the only dead tree paper I take, so I didnt' have any others to compare it to.

Sure, there's a lot of fluff in the Sunday edition. But they typically occupy the many, many insert sections, not A1.

1. Sand Springs is about as rural as, oh, Reston, Virginia. It's a Tulsa suburb and has been since Avery Drive opened in the 20s. It may not have the money of Jenks or the population of Broken Arrow, but it's a suburb, and to call it "rural" is disingenuous.

2. And speaking of disingenuous, yesterday half the above the fold space of the Washington Times was taken up by an article on... the problems of student-athletes. Not on the debates. Not on the war (though there was an article on what happened in Pakistan next to it). Not on the evils of Kerry (or Bush). No, it was ON NCAA ATHLETES. And yet you're not complaining about the WashTimes showing a lick of bias.

You all forget that the Sunday paper is mostly features and opinion, not hard news. And these multi-part opinion pieces are on the front cover because THEY SELL PAPERS. You run a four-part article and start it on Sunday, people will buy Mon-Tue-Wed papers to read the rest of it. This is about MONEY, people, not about BIAS.

Go over to the Newseum site some Sunday and look at all the covers of all the papers in this country. EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM will have a PROMINENT FEATURE ARTICLE taking up MOST OF THE SPACE ON THE PAGE. The only one that really fits the Joyner Standard of Quality (TM) was the Seattle Times' new series on Bush, Kerry, and the environment.

You are all so busy looking and complaining about bias that you ignore the basics of the newspaper business.