A Tale of Two Obituaries — and Two Very Different Standards

How corporate media soften tyrants abroad while sharpening labels at home.

Brian C. Joondeph | March 9, 2026

Death is supposed to clarify a life, not distort it.

Obituaries are meant to record history, not rewrite it.

But in today’s corporate media, even death cannot escape ideological spin.

Consider the recent coverage of Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader for more than three decades. 

In the Washington Post, readers were introduced to a man with a “bushy white beard and easy smile,” an “avuncular figure” fond of Persian poetry and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Some acquaintances described him as a “closet moderate.”

Image: AI illustration

A closet moderate? That description might surprise the regime’s political prisoners — and its victims.

For more than three decades, this “moderate” presided over a regime that funded Hezb'allah and Hamas, armed militias across the Middle East, imprisoned dissidents, executed protesters, brutalized women for dress-code violations, and has American blood on its hands through decades of proxy warfare.

Yet the obituary’s opening emphasis focused on literary sensibilities and grandfatherly optics.

The New York Times struck a similarly soft chord. With “spectacles, Palestinian kaffiyeh, long robes and silver beard,” Khamenei “cast himself as a religious scholar,” affecting “an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness.” He ran the country, we are told, from “a perch above the jousting of daily politics.”

Above the jousting, perhaps. But not above repression.

Yes, both papers documented the regime’s brutality. But framing matters. Lead paragraphs shape perception. When tyrants are introduced through imagery of scholarship and avuncular........

© American Thinker