The part of the answer may be that last year the Washington Times installed John Solomon, a former long-time AP and short time Washington Post reporter with no decreeable ideological bent, as editor. Solomon is a dogged reporter–and now editor–and has steered the news sections of the paper toward a more professional and balanced course. The slant of the editorial page of the paper remains well to the right, but news is now news.

But the second reason for this curious juxtaposition of the Post dissing Obama while the Washington Times writes an upbeat story is that we journalists like to run counter-intuitive stories.  Journalist are a great deal like sheep, we run in a herd, following the lead of conventional wisdom and story fashion.  But like sheep, we can quickly change direction.  That happened in Washington in June this year when after six months of mostly favorable Obama stories, the WashPost and the NYTimes reversed course and started running negative stories. This was sparked by the problems with the health care bill, but stoked by a slight drop in Obama’s poll numbers, his perceived gaff of calling the Cambridge (MA) police stupid, and the sense that he was spending money with reckless abandon.

So the negative stories began to appear and it didn’t matter that Obama got the F22s cut from the defense budget. It did matter that he won a gun control battle in the House. It didn’t matter–as the Washington Times noted –  that he got his

Silly face, silly gesture

Supreme Court nominee confirmed and sworn in. And it didn’t matter that the stock market had a great month and the unemployment bleeding has begun to subside. The NYTimes and WashPost have turned Obama-huffy. Even the picture editors got the memo: snaps of smiling Obama were replaced with pictures of Obamam with his silly face on.  My God, today  Frank Rich, of all people,  was snipping at Obama, if ever so subtly.

But it’s August in Washington. Traffic is noticeably light. Members of Congress are back home in their districts, wishing–I would guess–that they were back in Washington were those nice Capitol Police keep the nut cases and hecklers at bay.  Even Obama will be on vacation soon. The battles will be put on hold until September  when, in all likelihood, the press will change course once again.

But Ms.Acharia-Bath then complains about the service she and her husband received in the first class section of the plane. Finally when asked by the cabin staff how she got upgraded, she lies in a rather bullying manner. But the most amazing part of the story is that nowhere does she tell us what airline she was flying.  What? How could that be?

Now “Frequent Flier” is not a news column. Faithful and knowledgeable Times readers realize that the unjustified lines in the text indicate that the column is a special brand of analysis/commentary/opinion. But these offerings are edited and checked carefully by the copy desk. Strict rules apply. So it is very strange that a central fact — what airline was she writing about — was left out of the story, even if it was a commentary. Really would a restaurant commentator be allowed to dis a meal and not mention the name of the restaurant? Would a political figure be allowed to write an account of fiddling with some legislation without mentioning the name of the bill?  Of course not.

In recent years, careful and open sourcing has become something of a fetish at the Times. Times stories elaborately explain why a quotation has no named source attached to it — or where the information in a paragraph comes from. This is all to the good, even if it clutters up the story. But where were the editors when this story went to press? Who was demanding transparency for the readers? Nowhere in the story is the omission of the airline’s name explained.  The Times could claim that the writer said that she would not do the story if she were forced to name the airline. Perhaps so. Then don’t run the story. That’s what principled journalism is all about.

There’s another critical point: the writer blithely admits to lying to staff about her escapade, as well as bribing the check-in clerk with pop culture trinkets. How do the readers of the Times know she didn’t invent — or elaborately embroider — the whole tale?  Especially since she was allowed to hide the name of the airline from us.

This article was really unworthy of the Times which is still one of the world’s great newspapers and struggling mightily to maintain quality and standards in tough times. Do you agree? Check out the story yourself.

The Herald Tribune was indispensable to my mental well-being. I would read every page, sucking up world news, U.S. political intrigue, the columnists , the sports scores, the comics. Finding an old discarded IHT stuck, say, in the seat pocket of the Korean Airways jet was like discovering a forgotten energy bar in the gym bag. It didn’t matter that the issue was several days old; the IHT was one of those rare newspapers that could be read a week after its issue date and still be savored.

Many a foreign correspondent would come back to America and arrange to get the IHT delivered — at considerable cost — to them in the States. “It was our home town newspaper for 25 years,” a retired TIME magazine correspondent once told me. “I still enjoy reading it even here.” Here being the dark-wood splendor of the St. Botolph Club in Boston.

In the decades when I read the paper — from the ’70s through the ’90s — the International Herald Tribune was jointly owned by the Washington Post and the New York Times, but edited, in Paris, by someone usually chosen from outside the two papers. This was supposed to insure neutrality when picking the day’s best stories from the two papers to run in the IHT.

Post and Times correspondents working abroad had a love-hate relation with the IHT. They loved having their stories featured on the front page of the IHT for their foreign sources to read. After all, these were the days before the Web, so what appeared in the Trib carried weight with the Ministries of Information. But they hated the way Paris edited their stories. Most IHT stories ran short, really short, and good and important elements ended up brutally cut. Or so the correspondents always thought.

Recently I spent three weeks travelling in southern Africa and another couple weeks in Eastern Europe. I was looking forward to reading the Herald Trib again. But I came back to Washington disappointed, like someone who made an unhappy trip to visit the folks back home. Had it changed? Had I? Or was it just the times?

In 2002, the Times bought the Post out and took complete control of the paper, retaining the name, but adding the tag “The Global Edition of the New York Times” below the masthead. Perhaps this is part of the trouble. Gone are all those lighter-touch Post stories. Now it’s all heavy-duty Times stories with all their qualifiers and agonizingly long explanation of sources, attribution and historical implications. The IHT seems grayer, duller.

It is true the paper still runs several pages on high fashion, the fine arts, and culture. But the stories on these pages, mostly produced especially for the IHT, had a sort of pretentious tone to them, reflecting. I suspect, the paper’s attempt to appeal to a certain class of readers. While Americans, including business executives, expats, military personnel and even Peace Corps Volunteers when they can afford it, make up some of the readership of the IHT, the large majority of readers are successful — and wealthy — foreign elites eager to keep in touch with American and international trends. Being seen with the IHT — along with the Economist and the Financial Times — is a sign of sophistication in places like Sofia and Gaborone.

If, that is, you can find it. I was shocked that the IHT never popped up in Africa. I am sure it could be found on the Johannesburg airport newsstands, but it no longer has the pride of place it used to have and I did not notice it. Nor did I see it in the business class lounge. It was not on the newsstands of the hotels where I stayed. Ditto for my week in Macedonia: I never saw it. Only in Sofia was it on the newsstand. And when I asked the concierge about it, he pulled a plastic wrapped bundle from below his desk, broke the strap, and asked: would you like one? No one else, it seemed, was interested.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the IHT these days is, well, who needs it? I found myself reading daily news feeds on my iPhone: Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook keeps me up to date on politics. A nifty iPhone app called MLB gave me baseball box scores. I read the Washington Post and the New York Times on my little screen as well.

And I could always flip on the hotel TV where I not only got CNN (just as I always did), but also BBC World, Sky News, Al Jazeera, and even a couple hours of Deutsche Welle News in English. CNBC gave me financial news and ESPN America ran the sports scores, to say nothing of NHL Stanley Cup matches. Suddenly the IHT seems dispensable. A nice piece of dessert — but no longer essential comfort food.