You'll have heard, of course, of the maxim "Don't speak ill of the dead". However, you are probably less familiar with the media's recent modification to this: "Don't speak ill of the recently departed Foreign Secretary".
Over at the Financial Times political commentator Janan Ganesh noted William Hague, who announced he was stepping down as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs last week, "has hardly erred" since taking over the Foreign Office in 2010. "Nobody disputes his technical competence, his facility with a brief, his easy but authoritative style of management", explained Ganesh.
The Guardian's Diplomatic Editor Julian Borger reported that Hague had "suffered early setbacks but emerged at the end of it as a pioneering campaigner in partnership with one of the most glamorous film stars on the planet." Indeed, Borger devotes over half of his article's 756 words to Hague's work with film star Angelina Jolie on sexual violence. And the "early setbacks"? That would be the rumours of Hague having an affair with his assistant and the incident when planes broke down trying to rescue British citizens from Libya.
Perhaps most shocking of all, Zara Taylor-Jackson, UNICEF UK's Government Relations Manager, tweeted that Hague "has been a fantastic Foreign Secretary. He's shown remarkable leadership in his efforts to end sexual violence in conflict."
What these three responses to Hague's resignation reveal is that propaganda is just as much about what is left out as what is actually stated.
So all three failed to mention that Hague was a key player in the NATO attack on Libya in 2011. The West quickly overstepped the United Nations resolution, escalating the level of violence and number of dead and arguably fanning the flames of conflict into Mali. Today Libya is in a state of perpetual violent crisis, with rival militias fighting over Tripoli's international airport in the past week.
They also failed to mention Hague's role in pushing for war in Syria in August 2013, a course of action that would have increased the level of violence and dead, according to such anti-war liberal pinkos as two former NATO Secretary-Generals and Yacoub El Hillo, the highest ranking UN humanitarian official in Syria at the time.
They also failed to mention Hague's involvement in the continuing US-NATO military occupation of Afghanistan. Last week the United Nations reported civilian casualties in Afghanistan had surged 24 percent in the first half of the year - their highest levels since 2009.
They also failed to mention Hague's role in standing with Bahrain's rulers in opposition to democracy and human rights, and how Hague continued the long-standing British policy of supporting the other Gulf autocracies of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE, overseeing billions of dollars of arms sales to these undemocratic governments.
They also failed to mention that while Hague has been foreign secretary Britain has armed Israel and provided cast-iron support to Israel as it attacks the "prison camp" of Gaza.
And finally they also failed to mention how Hague has given his support to the murderous US 'war on terror' and all that entails - drones attacks on seven nations, US special forces operations across the world, extraordinary rendition and the US prisons in Bagram and Guantanamo.
All this is not to single out Hague as especially bad or evil - he is simply fulfilling his role as British Foreign Secretary. If he had thought or acted differently he would never have risen so high in the British political elite. As the historian Mark Curtis explained in his 1995 book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 "Rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour have been in power."
However, I would argue that writing an assessment of Hague's time as Foreign Secretary and not mentioning any of these significant global events displays an extraordinary level of internalised establishment-friendly thinking - something huge chunks of the British media seem to excel at. As Curtis said in his 2003 book Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, "The British liberal intelligentsia generally displays its servitude to the powers that be rather than to ordinary people, whether here or abroad."