I was really sad when I heard of his death and I read almost every obituary in all of the major newspapers.

• AP: Father of China’s Space Tech Program Dies at 98
• WSJ: Trained in the U.S., Scientist Became China’s ‘Rocket King’
• NYT: Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Dies at 98
• LA Times: Qian Xuesen dies at 98; rocket scientist helped establish Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• New Yorker: The Two Lives of Qian Xuesen
• Chicago Tribune: Father of Chinese missile programs
• Xinhua: China’s “father of space technology” dies at 98

Among all of them, I like the New York Times one and the Wall Street Journal one more than the others, because I found they provided more interesting detail information about Mr. Qian’s life both in the States and in China.

One of the examples tells how important Mr. Qian was to the world’s aviation industry even when he hadn’t been back to China to design rockets.

“In 1949, Mr. Qian wrote a proposal for a winged space plane that the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, in 2007, called an inspiration for research that led to NASA’s space shuttle,” says the New York Times.

As most people know, the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s halted China’s progress in most areas of Chinese society. But it was not the case for Mr. Qian and his work. “Mr. Qian was largely shielded from the persecution faced by many intellectuals, said Qian Xuemin, a retired professor who is Mr. Qian’s cousin. Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai ‘recognized his importance, and they protected him,’” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apparently, Mr. Qian remained bitter about his treatment by the U.S. government. He never returned to the States. Neither the Journal nor the Times omitted this fact.

“In 1979, Caltech gave Mr. Qian its Distinguished Alumni Award, but Mr. Qian declined to travel to California to receive the prize in person. A former colleague from CalTech eventually brought the award to Mr. Qian in China in 2001, on his 90th birthday,” the Journal says.

“Mr. Qian never returned to the United States. In a 2002 published reminiscence, a Caltech colleague and professor, Frank Marble, stated that he believed that Mr. Qian had ‘lost faith in the American government’ but that he had ‘always had very warm feelings for the American people,’” says the Times.

If I have to choose one between these two obituaries, I think the Times won over the Journal because of its concise and compelling lede –

“Qian Xuesen, a brilliant rocket scientist who single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts after he was drummed out of the United States during the redbaiting of the McCarthy era, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 98.”

Besides these two, I think the one from Xinhua news agency was also interesting because it gives information that American newspapers are not able to offer. It includes an interview with Mr. Qian’s colleague at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation; it tells a story about how Mr. Qian led the missile project team to overcome failures and finally helped China create its first medium- and short-range missile; it also shows a recent photo of Mr. Qian’s while the New York Times and the LA Times can only use the one of Mr. Qian’s 1948 photo provided by AP.

Now I’m done with my loved ones. The ones from AP, the New Yorker and Chicago Tribune were just OK to me. Nothing wrong, but just I didn’t feel they were exciting.

I don’t like the one on the LA Times for two main reasons. One is I think the chronic order of the narration was not clear enough. The other reason was I think the last sentence was really redundant. It says, “He is said to have supported the government’s crushing of the rebellion in Tiananmen Square in 1989.” First of all, it’s something that’s “said to be.” As a responsible journalist, shouldn’t we avoid such unsubstantiated source that may lead our readers make any illegitimate judgment on that?  Moreover, I didn’t see any meaningful and necessary reasons here to talk about this.

Still, it’s easy to see how political ideology could seep into an obituary of, well, anyone involved in politics, any celebrity with a political opinion, or, in the case of Kurt Vonnegut, a figure who represented a galvanized faction of agitated Americans during a time of great social turmoil.

Fox News, for example — perhaps unbiased in its news coverage but unabashedly conservative in its editorial tone — took aim at Vonnegut in an obituary aired on Special Report with Brit Hume.  YouTube user LiberalViewer criticized the network for including such phrases as “left-wing screeds” and “despondent leftism” when describing Vonnegut’s work, and for closing its story with this perceived uppercut: “Vonnegut, who failed at suicide 23 years ago, said 34 years ago that he hoped his children wouldn’t say of him when he was gone, ‘He made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man.  So I’ll say it for them.’”

But do we chalk up the inclusion of such words to bias or mere observation?  Vonnegut was, after all, well left of the political center, and his frustration with life was well documented.  The New York Times — perhaps unbiased in its news coverage but unabashedly liberal in its editorial tone — noted those things in its obituary, as well, commenting on his “profound pessimism” and his frazzled appearance:

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes.

And if Fox ended its obituary with an unnecessary jab, the Times pulled no punches, itself:

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.

In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Indubitably, that’s quite the written bookend to Vonnegut’s grief.

What do you think?  Did Fox give Kurt Vonnegut an unfair rap in its obituary of him or was the network doing as the Times did, observing the author’s defiant politics and mental struggles?  Moreover, what do you think about the ideologies of news outlets making their way into obituaries?  Is it a passable practice that highlights diversity of opinion about important figures in world history or should obituaries strictly adhere to “not speaking evil of the dead”?