WashPost Slants Leftward in Covering Lives of Galbraith, Friedman

My colleague Dan Gainor has an excellent take on how even in the obituary pages, The Washington Post carries the Left's water.

Even death isn’t a great equalizer at The Washington Post. Two of America’s most well-known economists died in 2006 – John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman. But there the similarities ended.

Galbraith, who the Post called “a preeminent symbol and source of liberal political thought” was deemed worthy of three news stories totaling more than 4,000 words. Although the Post credited Friedman with “tireless advocacy of unfettered free markets” that “reshaped the nation’s economic policies,” that earned him just 1,169 words and one news story, despite a Nobel Prize.

In fact, Galbraith cropped up in the Friedman obit that devoted two paragraphs to criticism of Friedman’s attitudes. It even quoted Galbraith biographer Richard Parker, who blamed Friedman’s “passionate calls for financial and securities market deregulation” for having “no small role in ushering in the half-trillion dollar S&L fiasco of the 1980s and the deeply corrupt Wall Street stock market boom of the 1990s.”

Contrast that with Galbraith. The Post ran obits on him two days in a row – a short one of just 377 words in the April 30 edition. The May 1 issue made up for that short shrift and devoted another 2,044 words and included a hint to the Post’s devotion, as well. The obit, written by Bret Barnes, described Galbraith as “long overlooked for a Nobel Prize, he received from Clinton in 2000 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. government’s highest civilian honor.” Both left out how left-wing Galbraith really was, as previously reported by the Business & Media Institute.