Bill McMorris of the Washington Free Beacon explores the mainstream media response to murderous Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s death.

On November 25, 2016, Black Friday here in the United States, the world said farewell to a “fiery apostle,” a “spiritual beacon,” a “charismatic icon,” and a model “of wit and clarity” who led a “joyful, raucous, and brash” movement that even “critics praised [for its] advances in health care and in education.” Fidel Castro died of an undisclosed illness at age 90, sending residents of his fortress state into nine days of official mourning—one for each decade of a life defined by “huge personal charm and charisma, and his political genius.”

That political genius helped make him “the world’s longest ruling head of government, aside from monarchs,” as Time said. His longevity amazed the American press corps. The precocious strongman “bedeviled 11 American presidents…frustrating all of Washington’s attempts to contain him,” according to the New York Times.

Castro’s reign stands in contrast to other world leaders who have died in recent years. New York Times readers remember North Korea’s Kim Jong Il for ruling “with an iron hand over a country he kept on the edge of starvation and collapse, fostering perhaps the last personality cult in the Communist world,” and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet as a “Dictator Who Ruled by Terror.” The Times obituary never calls Castro a dictator, though it acknowledges that his “enemies in Washington” did. Great Britain’s Guardian newspaper said it is “hard to sustain” the critics’ argument that a leader who ruled for five decades without free elections, and who imprisoned tens of thousands of political opponents, could be classified as a dictator.