AP flaunts leftism with obits: Thatcher v. Chavez

British PM Margaret Thatcher: 1925 – 2013

Happening upon this J.P. Freire posting was nothing less than finding a ray of brilliance. He concludes his excellent comparison of the Associated Press’ obituaries of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday, with Venezuela’s socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, using these well-chosen words:

“Well, now we know who history’s villains truly were! You can challenge the status quo if you’re a socialist, and then you’ll get treated as a hero by the Associated Press, even if your oil-rich country is still an economic basketcase and a morass for the rule of law. But if you’re a free market evangelist who succeeded in rescuing a nation from the hazards of an overweening state through privatizing, you’re controversial.  Gotcha.”

In our recent post, Winston Smith: Alive and well at Associate Press, we exposed the news organization’s altering of its Stylebook to reflect what is bogusly described as using “the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere.”  Read that to mean the most leftwing interpretation of any factual news report.

We outed AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor by declaring “her politically correct contrivance reminiscent of Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s best seller “1984,” writing:

“Smith was employed as a clerk in the government’s Ministry of Truth Records Department. His job was to rewrite historical documents to align with the constantly changing current political deception. Newspeak, a reduced language became the tool to limit free thought and concepts posing a threat to the totalitarian regime. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct was classified as “thought crime,” “crime think,” or “doublethink. Smith’s work included manipulating facts, revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs to remove “unpersons,” the term used to describe people who had fallen out of favor with the party.”

In Lady Thatcher’s case her complimentary working relationship with President Ronald Reagan — both were relentless patriots and free market conservatives – would have definitely classified her as an “unperson — hence AP’s snide final words, repeated today in the Periódico de la República de Arizona (Arizona Republic).  The accompanying headline reads: “‘Divisive’ Thatcher influenced Reagan.” The dying newspaper subscribes to the AP feed, but its own cartoonist, Steve Benson’s characterization best explains the snarky scorn:

In The Review, J.P. Freire expertly finishes off the exposé. Read it here.