…threatened by the current industry-wide newspaper fiscal crisis is the LA Times’s interminable Important Dammit National Feature Story, a genre apparently developed by the old LAT management to try and persuade NY/DC snobs that Angelenos could, indeed, read and write. (Time magazine infamously described the genre as “the newsprint equivalent of suburban sprawl.”)

Today’s example (free registration required, alas): A really, really long expose of the Gates Foundation’s investments in corporations that just may be hurting the very people, including third-world kids, the foundation’s promising to help.

(High up among the allegations: the charge that the foundation’s investments in big drug companies, with their high profit margins and their aggressive patent attorneys, contradicts its stated goal of eradicating AIDS in the developing world.)