The corporate media in the United States have rarely met a servant of empire who isn’t eligible for hagiography in death, whether or not they presided over mass murder worldwide. In the case of Dick Cheney, who died on November 4, media outlets have summoned everything in their power to sugarcoat the blood-drenched career of the most powerful US vice president in history, a position he notoriously occupied for the duration of the two-term administration of George W. Bush from 2001–09.
As VP, he was chief architect of the “Global War on Terror,” with a hands-on role in manufacturing the disinformation that manufactured consent for the Iraq invasion based on imaginary WMDs and fictional ties to 9/11. The hundreds of thousands of deaths from that war are Cheney’s most significant legacy. . . .
As the obituaries proliferate in the establishment press, it’s hard to find a single one that isn’t complicit in sanitizing—to the extent possible—Cheney’s trajectory of mass destruction. . . the US corporate media has shown its true colors by legitimizing and euphemizing the track record of someone who is responsible for an inconceivably massive quantity of suffering and death worldwide.
As Iraqi scholar and poet Sinan Antoon recently put it: “In a different world Dick Cheney would definitely be a war criminal and would be standing trial.”
But we’re stuck with the world we have—and the media aren’t doing anything to make it any better. READ MORE AT FAIR.