Grey wrote on May 6^th, 2011 at 10:51am:

Excellent OBL obit in the Guardian this week - still the best newspaper in the world IMO.

I still think the Guardian obit was pretty good, although obviously cobbled together in a hurry it provided a potted history with no obvious bias IMO. The "CIA had no contact with such figures" statement suggests to me the CIA were probably dealing with people they thought were significant at the time, al-Qaida and Bin Laden not emerging until later, a year or so before the Soviets left. Robin Cook's observation that al-Qaida and Bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies" is true, but the operative words are "a product", something that developed from that miscalculation. However I agree with you that the Guardian is not the paper it once was. My dad always extolled the quality of the old Manchester Guardian. Like you probably, I’ve been reading the international edition for many years and have noticed with each physical decrease in size it’s become more like the website version with shorter, eye-catching articles. It definitely ain't what it was, but I still prefer it to most of the competition.