Flashback to 2008 - AP Lies About Obama's Communist Mentor

https://www.aim.org/aim-column/ap-lies-about-obamas-red-mentor/

AP Lies About Obama’s Red Mentor

by Cliff Kincaid on August 4, 2008

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The influential Associated Press (AP) wire service has belatedly run a story about Barack Obama’s Marxist mentor without mentioning the smoking-gun evidence that the mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a Communist Party member. The dishonest story, which represents damage control for the Obama campaign, was written by AP writer Sudhin Thanawala.

AP is one of the largest news agencies and serves thousands of print and electronic media outlets.

Under the innocuous headline, “Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life,” the story calls Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) when it faithfully echoed the Stalinist line, merely a “left-leaning black journalist and poet” known for “leftist politics” and someone who might be accused by some of having “allegedly anti-American views.”

Davis was not a “journalist” in any real sense of the term. He was a propagandist and racial agitator for the CPUSA. He was also a recruiter for the communist cause.

Media Bias

The slanted AP story features quotes only from supporters or friends of Davis and Obama. But those picked to defend Davis are themselves interesting.

Ah Quon McElrath, identified as merely “a friend” of Davis’s and quoted by AP, was actually an organizer for the communist-controlled International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The ILWU was led by Davis’s friend and associate, secret CPUSA member Harry Bridges. Davis wrote for a newspaper, the Honolulu Record, which was controlled by the CPUSA and subsidized by the ILWU.

McElrath is quoted by AP as saying, “You could get a lot of strength from a person like Frank who had suffered all the discrimination…that a black man goes through in America.”

Davis went to Hawaii in 1948 after consulting with Bridges and Paul Robeson, another secret CPUSA member. He was a mentor to Obama during the years 1975-1979 and died in 1987.

Obama supporter Dr. Kathryn Takara is quoted in the AP piece as saying that “Frank was part of a group of black vanguard intellectuals.” Takara was the associate producer of a program about Davis that, like the AP story, ignored his CPUSA affiliation. So while she knows a lot about Davis, she seems blind to the evidence of Davis’s service to the communist cause.

https://www.aim.org/aim-column/ap-lies-about-obamas-red-mentor/