Craig Fehrman says Jack Anderson‘s obsessive coverage of Nixon marked the beginning of our modern scandal culture.
In 1967, the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting unanimously recommended that the award go to the muckraking columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson for their expose of the financial chicanery of Thomas Dodd, a powerful senior Democratic senator. The prize instead went to two Wall Street Journal reporters for a story about gambling and organized crime that the members of the jury had not even read.
The reversal by the Pulitzer advisory board created a scandal on top of a scandal. Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Associated Press all ran down the suspicious details, starting with the fact that the Journal had submitted its winning story in a different category (local as opposed to national reporting). Did Pearson and Anderson lose the Pulitzer because of their reputation for employing ethically fuzzy methods? Or did they lose it because the advisory board looked down on them as practitioners of the crude arts of scandal-mongering and sensationalism?
