On Dec. 1, 2003, this obituary headline appeared in the New York Times: "Sylvia Bernstein, 88, Civil Rights Activist, Dies."

 Though the passing of Mrs. Bernstein was reported in almost every major newspaper in the country, there is a good chance you missed it.

 Too bad. Because the headline and the obituary tell you a great deal about the moral compass of mainstream American (and world) journalism.

 For, if you read through the entire piece (almost always either a verbatim or edited Associated Press report), you will come across this one line: "Members of the Communist Party in the 1940s, the Bernsteins were targets of government scrutiny."

 Note the headline: Mrs. Bernstein is described simply as a "civil rights activist." Indeed the whole obituary is a laudatory description of her and her husband's work "to desegregate area restaurants, an amusement park and pools and playgrounds. She advocated home rule for the District of Columbia and protested the Vietnam War and the development of nuclear weapons."

 Quite a terrific lady, no?

 According to every one of the seven major newspapers I checked, Mrs. Bernstein was described as essentially a wonderful, idealistic lady. So what if she was a member of the Communist Party at a time when Joseph Stalin was murdering and enslaving more human beings than anyone else had in history? So what if she was a member of the party that supported those who wished to destroy America, the land that her parents had fled to in order to be free people? So what if she remained in the Communist Party even after it supported the Soviet peace pact with Hitler's Nazi Germany?

 None of this matters to mainstream journalists. For these people, the fact that a person was a member of the American Communist Party when it obeyed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party is as irrelevant to a moral assessment of that person as if she had been a member of a stamp club. In fact, the only time her membership was even mentioned in the AP obituary printed in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere, was to invoke Mrs. Bernstein's victimhood.

 As noted above, in the words of the AP report as printed in the New York Times: "Members of the Communist Party in the 1940s, the Bernsteins were targets of government scrutiny." Continued...