The columnist : leaks, lies, and libel in Drew Pearson's Washington / Donald A. Ritchie.
"In the Washington Merry-Go-Round, a nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared in hundreds of papers from 1932 to 1969, as well as on weekly radio and television programs, the investigative journalist Drew Pearson revealed news that public officials tried to suppress. He disclosed po...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via ProQuest) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2021]
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "In the Washington Merry-Go-Round, a nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared in hundreds of papers from 1932 to 1969, as well as on weekly radio and television programs, the investigative journalist Drew Pearson revealed news that public officials tried to suppress. He disclosed policy disputes and political spats, exposed corruption, attacked bigotry, and promoted social justice. He pumped up some political careers and destroyed others. Presidents, prime ministers, and members of Congress repeatedly called him a liar, and he was sued for libel more often than any other journalist, but he won most of his cases by proving the accuracy of his charges. Pearson dismissed most official news as propaganda and devoted his column to reporting what officials were doing behind closed doors. He broke secrets-even in wartime-and revealed classified information. Fellow journalists credited him with knowing more dirt about more people in Washington than even the FBI and compared his efforts to Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers or Edward Snowden with WikiLeaks, except that he did it daily. The Columnist examines how Pearson managed to uncover secrets so successfully and why government efforts to find his sources proved so unsuccessful. Drawing on a half century of archival evidence it assesses his contributions as a muckraker by verifying or refuting both his accusations and his accusers"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (1 volume) : illustrations. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780190067618 0190067616 9780190067601 0190067608 9780190067595 0190067594 |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on August 27, 2021) |