It’s amazing how nuanced obituaries can be for figures that liberal media types appreciate. The portrait is always complicated. But less so when it’s a conservative. Conservative radio star Rush Limbaugh passed away this week and The New York Times slammed him with an obit about “hate,” “mistrust” and grievances.” The online version featured a sub-headline sliming him as “pushing talk radio to the right with misogynistic and racist language and conspiracy theories.”
When conservative Supreme Court icon Antonin Scalia died, here’s the dour, negative headline from the February 14, 2016 print Washington Post:
As I wondered at the time, what was the most important thing for readers of Washington Post to see on the front-page of the paper? A big headline focusing directly on the legacy or impact of the life of Antonin Scalia? No, just that liberals didn’t care for him. Here’s the front page when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died:
When cruel terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in 2019, the Post was much nicer to him than Scalia, calling the killer an “austere religious scholar.”
But when Fidel Castro died, The New York Times cheered, “A Revolutionary Who Defied the U.S. and Held Cuba in His Thrall.” The Post remembered how the “Revolutionary Remade Cuba.”
The lesson in all of this is that when you die, it’s better to be a liberal, a far-left dictator or a terrorist than a conservative. According to outlets like The Washington Post and New York Times anyway.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.