Dick Cheney died last week, and that has created some confusing feelings for a lot of people. On the one hand, plenty of folks view Cheney as a uniquely negative force in American politics and on the world stage. But, you know, it’s disrespectful to dance on someone’s grave, as the saying goes. And views of Cheney mellowed over the years for many Americans. After all, nothing he did in eight years as Vice President was as bad as the wreckage that Donald Trump manages to create in any given week as our current President.
We appreciate now Cheney’s warnings to his Republican party about Trump, though few listened. Ahead of the 2024 election, Cheney said, “There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” He called Trump a “coward,” and said he voted for Kamala Harris.
But there’s an irony in the timing of Dick Cheney’s death that I need to talk about today. I’m grateful to the media critic Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University, for drawing this to my attention. It’s fact that would be noticed only by somebody pretty deeply steeped in journalism lore, which I am, a half-century after I launched a journalism career. Here it is: On the same day that we learned that Cheney had died, McClatchy Newspapers announced that it was shutting down its Washington news bureau and its national news team, cutting about two dozen journalist jobs.
On its face, this cutback isn’t hugely consequential. After all, the number of journalists per thousand population in America has dropped by more than 70 percent since 2002, so what’s a couple dozen more? But here’s the observation of Dan Kennedy: He said, “It was McClatchy — then known as Knight-Ridder — that did more than any news organization to expose the Bush-Cheney administration's lies and falsehoods in the run-up to the disastrous war in Iraq.”
Back in 2003, Dick Cheney, perhaps the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, surely pushed the weak-willed George W. Bush to launch an invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Thus began what Bush and Cheney called a “Global War on Terror.” It was a terrible mistake, upsetting the power dynamics in a world hot spot, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and creating enemies of America for generations to come. That bad idea was sold to the American people and their representatives in Congress with bad data and false arguments – lies, we later learned – which mainstream U.S. news organizations mostly failed to uncover or adequately report.
But one news bureau in Washington notably did better. It was the bureau for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, which became the McClatchey bureau – the outfit that was shut down last week. It served readers in a lot of big cities, like Philadephia, Detroit, Miami and Kansas City. A few months before America’s so-called “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad, that bureau uncovered what reporters labeled “exaggerated evidence of the threat” of Hussein, and “deep misgivings” of key intelligence and military insiders about the march toward war; it noted that the administration was squelching opposing views in the intelligence community – intentionally misleading Americans, that is.
Maybe the failure of other news organizations can be explained by one of the realities of journalism – that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but rather is a reflection of the society it serves. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans were extraordinarily accepting of the idea of using military force for payback, whatever the target or justification. And that’s what emerged back then from the reporting of the big news organizations, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which in turn set the tone for network newscasts. Too few reporters dug out the truth, and America went to war.
That’s why the decline of so many news organizations in the digital age – and the era of Donald Trump – is so worrisome. Resources that once supported the likes of the truth-telling McClatchey bureau now go to Google and Meta and other big outfits that care not a whit about the ethical standards that guide the so-called legacy media. And the Trump administration is doing all it can to undermine real journalism – for example, by giving Pentagon reporting credentials to a mess of fawning rightwing influencers. With fewer reporters digging for the truth, Americans are more vulnerable to the manipulation of the Dick Cheneys of this era. What we know about the offenses of the Trump administration is bad enough; imagine what we don’t know.
So as some mourn the late vice president, I’m focused more on the missing truth-tellers in Washington and everywhere else that honest journalism has been disrupted, disputed and downsized. We have never before been more in need of eyes to see what’s beyond our own view, and voices to challenge our assumptions. Today, we mourn their loss.
Rex Smith, the host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
