Cheney Vs. Journalism

The Nation: Vice President Makes Nice With Press

(The Nation) 
Cheney summed up his attitude when, during a campaign stop in Naperville, Illinois, in 2000, non-newspaper reader George W. Bush noted the presence of one of the few reporters he actually knew by name.

"There's Adam Clymer -- major-league asshole -- from the New York Times," grumbled Bush.

"Yeah, big time," said Cheney.

Clymer was not the first journalist to end up on Cheney's "big-time" asshole list. A quarter century before the 2000 incident, when Cheney was serving as the White House chief of staff in Gerald Ford's administration, he organized a West Wing discussion about how to launch a criminal investigation of journalist Seymour Hersh -- and the New York Times, for which Hersh was writing then. In May, 1975, Hersh had written an article exposing the fact that US Navy submarines had intercepted high-level Soviet military communiques by tapping into underwater telecommunications cables. Only after learning that the Soviets were not surprised by the spying -- presumably, they expected it -- did Cheney back off from the discussion of how best to go after one of the nation's most respected investigative journalists. (Cheney's concern for protecting intelligence gathering operations is somewhat episodic.

While he was coordinating the debate about how to go after Hersh in the 1970s, he convened no such discussion in 2003, when concerns were raised about the prospect that Cheney or a member of his staff had "outed" CIA agent Valarie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had exposed the dubious use of intelligence by a White House that was bent on making a "case" for war with Iraq.)

Hersh and Clymer need not feel particularly insulted. Throughout his career, Cheney has generally viewed journalists as the enemy. In April, 2004, shortly after the invasion of 2003, the vice president reacted to reports that US troops had killed three journalists on the same day, after firing into the Iraq office of the al-Jazeera network and the Palestine Hotel, where many international reporters were staying, by saying that this was "the sort of thing that happens in warfare." Cheney declared that "you'd have to be an idiot to believe that (the attacks were intentional)." But, around the world, leaders of journalist organizations, diplomats and prominent political figures expressed precisely that concern.

Cheney's disregard for the fourth estate is not universal, however. He has always had favorite journalists, some of whom are able chroniclers of the conservative cause (such as the Washington Post's Lou Cannon) but most of whom are the stenographers to power who peddle White House talking points as "news."