Legendary journalist Wayne Barrett, a Donald Trump biographer and investigative reporter for nearly 40 years with the Village Voice, died Thursday. He was 71.
Barrett had been battling lung cancer and interstitial lung disease. Barrett’s family said he had recently developed pneumonia, which worsened his condition.
With books and articles about the city’s movers and shakers, Barrett became an important voice in New York — and a thorn in the side of many of the people who ran the city.
Last year, his 1991 Trump biography was republished in paperback with the title: “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention.”
Barrett died a day before Trump’s inauguration.
He had covered the 2016 presidential election for the Daily Beast and Mother Jones.
Barrett, whose other books included “Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudy Giuliani,” earned a reputation in New York as a tireless unearther of facts, as hard on Giuliani as he was on another mayor, Ed Koch.
“For four decades Wayne Barrett was flat out the best reporter in New York City,” David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, told CNNMoney last year.
In a new foreword to his Trump book, Barrett had criticized the “cowardly silence” of the press on the role of race in the 2016 campaign.
“In a season of broadcast blunders, the worst was the race coverup, with vacuous analysts, especially on primary nights, going on and on about anything but race explaining the Trump tide,” Barrett wrote.
Barrett reserved his harshest criticism for TV news.
“All of my life, I have believed and said, we’re in the truth-telling business. Our job is to tell truth,” he told CNN. “I can’t say that anymore about broadcast journalism.”
In recent years, Barrett wrote and reported for the Daily News as well as The Daily Beast.
Barrett was saluted across the city.
“Wayne Barrett devoted his life to truth-telling for the public good,” said Daily News Editor-in-Chief Arthur Browne. “He was a New York treasure.”
Gov. Cuomo said Barrett “did his job without malice and with an absolute dedication to the facts.”
“Wayne Barrett held the powerful accountable, inspired generations of journalists and made this a better city,” Mayor de Blasio tweeted.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he respected Barrett’s “sense of moral purpose.”
“His death is a major loss for New York journalism, but students of our city’s history will be reading his work for decades to come,” Bloomberg said in a statement Thursday.
Barrett is survived by his wife, Fran, and son, Mac, three brothers and two sisters.
He was unceremoniously laid off from the Voice in 2010. Barrett said at the time that he never got an explanation for being dumped — although he suspected it was due to budgetary reasons.
“It’s like trading DiMaggio,” Donald Forst, who was editor of the paper from 1996 to 2006, said at the time. “It really won’t be the same without him.”