January 3, 1996
N.Y. TIMES SHUNS "COMMUNISM"

Communism may not be dead, but the word and its derivatives are obviously not welcome in obituaries in The New York Times. When our long-time friend and colleague at Accuracy in Media, Bernard Yoh, died recently, we provided the media with an obituary that said he had dedicated most of his life to the fight against communism, both with bullets and with ideas. It said one of his ideas was that the Free World should have as its goal a world without communism.
The New York Times ran an obituary, but it omitted all references to Bernie's anti-communist ideas and activities. In an obituary of a man who had devoted most of his life to fighting communism, that word was not mentioned once.
But this was not unique. When Daniel James, another distinguished warrior in this battle, died in December 1994, The New York Times excised from his obituary all references to his affiliation with the anti-communist magazine, "The New Leader," and to the books he wrote exposing communist efforts to take over Guatemala, Cuba and Bolivia.
Four months later, when John Chamberlain, an even better known journalist and author, passed away, the Times obituary contained not a hint that he was an outspoken anti-communist. Chamberlain, who had worked for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and had written a nationally syndicated column for a quarter of a century, was famous for his defense of the free enterprise system in his books and columns. He was an outspoken critic of communism. The Times obituary gave no hint that he harbored any political views at all.
Irene Corbally Kuhn, another veteran reporter, columnist and author, passed away at age 97 on Dec. 30, 1995. She had worked as a reporter in China, but unlike many of the "old-China hands" who populated the State Department, she was a strong anti-communist. She was a leader in the effort to block the sell-out of Chiang Kai-shek and the surrender of China to Mao. The readers of her obituary in The New York Times learned nothing of her lifelong hostility to communism. The friend who submitted material for her obituary to the Times said he omitted that because he "knew the Times would toss it out."
It is not that the Times has a policy of keeping political views and activities out of its obituaries. Eric Pace, the same reporter whose by-line graced Irene Corbally Kuhn's politically antiseptic obituary, composed one about a German playwright named Heimer Muller that ran three days later. The Times gave it more space, including a photo, than it devoted to the obituaries of John Chamberlain, Daniel James and Irene Kuhn combined.
It described Muller as "an independent Marxist" who pursued "a powerful critique of both the failed socialist experiment in his native East Germany and the barbarity of capitalism." Since even Muller's admirers were said to describe his plays as "extremely idiosyncratic and frequently difficult for theatergoers to understand," we wonder what, if anything, except his aversion to capitalism, explains why the Times treated him so generously.
On Oct. 10, the Times had devoted to the obituary of former British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home about the same amount of space it gave Muller. Also written by Eric Pace, it dripped with contempt for this anti-communist conservative who had warned British voters in 1964 that a victory by the Labor Party would result in "a massive surrender of freedom to the state." Labor won that election, and Eric Pace quoted the victor, Laborite Harold Wilson, as describing Sir Alec Douglas-Home as "an elegant anachronism." He didn't mention that in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power and began the painful process of removing many of the shackles imposed by Labor governments.
The Times was kinder to John Cairncross in an adjoining obituary the same day. Cairncross, an admitted Soviet spy, had worked in the British Foreign Office, Treasury and the Prime Minister's private office. He was one of five infamous Soviet spies recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s. He claimed his motivation was to defeat Hitler, according to the Times, but he spied when Hitler and Stalin were friends, and he was still spying six years after Hitler's death.
A Soviet source was quoted as saying Cairncross provided information about nuclear weapons, but this was set against the spy's claim that he had passed no information harmful to Britain's interests and that he was not a traitor. It is hard to perfume a spy, but the Times did its best to disguise the smell of skunk.
The word "communist" appeared once in this obituary. It said Cairncross denied ever joining the Communist Party. <><><>