Good investigative journalism ... is an essential part of our representative democracy, offering all of us — the people who have the most at stake in who represents us in Washington and how they and other officials behave on our behalf — the chance to understand more fully what’s going on. I often think to myself how dull our lives would be without the difficult, important work that enterprising journalists do. They get for us the facts and — mostly — put them in context so that we can understand what we need to know.
