Robert McCartney’s column on local issues appears Thursdays and Sundays in The Post’s Metro section. He also does a Friday radio commentary on WAMU (88.5 FM), and has been a regular guest on local television stations WTTG Fox 5 and News Channel 8. Before becoming a columnist in 2009, McCartney was The Post’s top Metro editor. In that 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.