Unsurprisingly Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday, featured on the front of every newspaper today. Also unsurprisingly, there is no concensus on the controversial politician.
The more balanced of the coverage opts to declare, with no risk of contradiction, that Thatcher divided the country. The i's "As divisive in death as she was in life" is probably the most honest and accurate of the front page depictions:
Like her or loathe her: A number of papers have reported that Thatcher left the country fiercely divided.
Not all of the papers present this reality, however. The Mail and The Telegraph set the tone of their reverential coverage with the same haloed photo of the former prime minister.
The Mail and The Telegraph aimed for 'halo' but ended up a little bit '
Liberace'. Times columnist Caitlin Moran said it looked like the album cover of "Thatcher Sings Mellow Melodies".
Not content with publishing airbrushed pictures of models, it seems some corners of the media are now attempting to airbrush a woman's whole career.
But such an approach does nobody much credit, especially not those newspapers holding themselves up as the guardians of free speech and openness while whitewashing the career of one of our most controversial prime ministers. You will find some newspapers have completely overlooked Thatcher's relationship with General Pinochet, for example. Others present smiling pictures of Thatcher with Mandela but make little mention of her branding him a terrorist, or her tacit support for Apartheid.
Of course, the likes of The Daily Mail and The Telegraph were always going to fondly remember Thatcher. Throughout the eighties she was the standard bearer for many of the political views they hold sacred and the parts of the country where she did the greatest damage were hardly the Telegraph or the Mail's traditional heartland. The fact is, many of their readers will have been among those who profited at the expense of so many under Thatcher. They won't care about those who got left behind.
But there is taking a narrow, partisan view and there is trying to rewrite history:
Thatcher spent her final days as a guest at The Ritz hotel, owned by The Telegraph's proprietors, David and Frederick Barclay. Their newspaper fondly remembers her today.
Recently The Telegraph wrote of a left wing conspiracy to "force the press to serve defined social and political
objectives – at the expense, if necessary, of the right to free expression". Yesterday the paper turned off reader comments on its Thatcher stories because the public's opinions were starkly at odds with its own.
It is not surprising that readers took it upon themselves to attempt to redress the balance of The Telegraph's coverage. And we shouldn't be surprised that in doing so, some will have taken that to extremes.
An element of this criticism could of course be filed under 'right wing paper in right wing, shocker' but even for such a conservative and infamously right wing paper as The Telegraph, there is a wide and capacious line which can be walked between speaking ill of a deceased Tory Prime Minister and being factually accurate as a matter of historical record.
The line-up of commentators it wheeled out lacked any semblance of balance. There was a solitary nod to the left with Telegraph blogger Dan Hodges though all he could muster was 124 words urging Thatcher's critics to "set aside... our political differences and acknowledge...the achievements of the first women [sic] to hold the highest office in our land".
The likes of The Mirror and more so The Guardian have openly conceded that Thatcher divided people and have shown a fairly professional level of
respect for views on both sides of this political, social and cultural rift.
Meanwhile it is surely no coincidence that the most clicked article on The Telegraph's website this morning was a piece about how other newspapers covered Thatcher's death. Perhaps even Telegraph readers expect
some balance.
While all this was going on, The Sun offered up the most perplexing front page of the day. Perhaps unusually fearful of a backlash, The Sun chose not to try to even tackle the balancing act between the rights and undeniable wrongs of Thatcher's career, instead focussing on where the body was found:
'Old lady dies in bed': It looks like The Sun was trying almost too hard to say nothing of interest.
