Foreign news? What's that?

Sigh. And people wonder why Americans don't know anything about the world. The Baltimore Sun has announced it is closing its Moscow and Johannesburg bureaus and shifting its Jerusalem bureau chief into its parent company's foreign news operations. Newsday will be closing its Beirut and Islamabad bureaus in upcoming months. Last year, both Newsweek and Time shut down several foreign bureaus, and U.S. News & World Report might as well start calling itself U.S. Report. That leaves...oh, let's see...the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and L.A. Times with a substantial number of its own reporters on the ground outside US borders. And President Bush and a good deal of Congress are trying to clamp down on those organizations (ok, maybe not the WSJ, at least not its editorial pages). It's a sad day for American media.