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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 (web site) 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 (web site) 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.

In fact, Davis was a hard-core but secret CPUSA member with a history of involvement in CPUSA fronts who was so much of a Stalinist that he opposed U.S. participation in World War II during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but then supported U.S. involvement after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia.

Strangely, the AP article quotes John Edgar Tidwell, a University of Kansas professor who edited Davis's books, as declining by e-mail an interview request because Davis has allegedly become the victim of a "McCarthy-era strategy of smear tactics and condemnation by association." Tidwell knows that Davis was a secret CPUSA member and cites evidence in one of his books, including from one of Davis's private letters, to prove it. Davis refused to deny his CPUSA membership as late as 1956, when a congressional inquiry had named him as a member of the communist underground.

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