Have you ever heard of H. R. McMasters?

In today’s Washington Post Fred Hiatt laments “the vanishing foreign correspondent:”

“Maybe the old model just can’t work anymore. Though The Washington Post has managed to maintain its stable of 20-plus foreign correspondents, no newspaper, including The Post, is insulated from the pressure of Internet competition for advertising dollars. Nor are the television networks, which have cut way back on their foreign bureaus as well.

“Yet in an era when clan structures in Somalia or separatist movements in the Philippines may have a direct bearing on U.S. national security — when the people who run multinational companies such as GE regularly complain that Americans don’t understand the world — we should all worry about who, if anyone, will report from abroad.”

I’d agree wholeheartedly — except that I don’t think foreign correspondents nowadays are telling us much about what they cover. I attended a talk at AEI on Iraq, and in the course of the event, the name H. R. McMasters, a general in the army, came up. Apparently, he’s done a great job in Iraq.

Never heard of the guy. Read the papers every day, and never saw a thing about H. R. I had no idea that any general was succeeding at anything in Iraq. Maybe H. R. is so busy generaling that he not giving enough press conferences.