On page 294 of Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, Fawn Brodie talks about an investigative reporter by the name of Drew Pearson:
"Both
[Joseph] McCarthy and Nixon had been castigated by Drew Pearson,
Washington gadfly columnist and radio commentator. Although Pearson had
been called a liar by FDR, Truman, and a score of congressmen, he was
nevertheless widely feared for the general accuracy of his exposures and
his willingness to risk libel suits. Only long after his death was he
recognized as one of the nation's most courageous investigative
reporters." Brodie then goes on to describe the time that Senator
Joseph McCarthy beat Pearson up (and I mean literally).
Pearson
worked with another famous investigative reporter, Jack Anderson. On
page 277, Brodie refers to a discovery that Pearson and Anderson made in
her attempt to argue that Nixon indeed benefited some of the wealthy
contributors to his controversial fund: "Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson
discovered that two oilmen contributors, who had been refused government
permission to explore for oil on a military reservation, were now
beneficiaries of a Nixon bill to open up that reservation for
exploration."
Don Fulsom in Nixon's Darkest Secrets
states that Jack Anderson may have had a religious motivation for his
muckraking: "A strict moralist, Anderson's stated lifetime goal was to
keep government honest. A devout Mormon, he viewed his reportorial
undertaking as a noble summons from the Almighty" (page 85). I did not
know that Anderson was a Mormon.
I suppose that my attitude
towards investigative reporters is love-hate. It does give me pleasure
when wrongdoing is exposed. When I was growing up, relatives of mine
would lament the hypocrisy in the political and religious systems and
would say, "Now, when the two witnesses come on the scene, that will be
exposed," or "When God is judging these people at the White Throne
Judgment, their misdeeds will be exposed." (The two witnesses are those
two prophets in Revelation 11.) My Dad one time said, "60 Minutes does a better job preaching the Gospel than those Armstrongite churches," or something to that effect. He was praising 60 Minutes for uncovering wrongdoing.
On
the other hand, investigative reporting can mix facts with rumor, and
it can wrongfully ruin people's reputations. This was a concern that
was expressed about Drew Pearson, according to this wikipedia article.
Moreover, Nixon did not like the way that his secret plans for
negotiating with foreign leaders would end up in Jack Anderson's column,
for that sort of hindered the negotiations by tipping the foreign
leaders off to our strategies.