Previously he was a business editor and writer at the Long Beach Press-Telegram, covering the aerospace industry and finance.
[1] Chaney, an editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner before it folded in 1989, had access to original Hearst documents and letters.
[3] Chaney and Cieply portrayed William Randolph Hearst as a man who stunted his sons' lives, stopping them from going further in college than he had been able to do, giving them elaborate job titles and grand salaries but no real authority, mocking their ideas for the family business, and writing a will that put the family assets into a trust over which they had no authority.
In 1975 when the journalists at the Herald Examiner won the right to form a union, Cheney was vice-president of the local.
[5] Chaney was spokesman for the Committee that organized the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.