Robert McCartney is The Washington Post’s senior regional correspondent, covering government and politics in Greater Washington. McCartney does a Friday morning radio analysis on local issues on WAMU (88.5 FM). He has also appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC and Fox News, and local outlets Fox 5 TV, WRC TV, and WTOP and WMAL radio. 

McCartney wrote a twice-weekly Metro column from 2009 to February 2015, and he was the Post’s top Metro editor from 2005 to 2009. In the latter job, he supervised coverage of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, for which the staff received the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. Since joining the Post in 1982, McCartney has held a wide variety of jobs – including foreign editor, national security editor, foreign correspondent in Mexico and Germany and managing editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. 

As a reporter, McCartney covered the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and they have a grown son.