The one thing I never understood about the media’s hatred of Nixon was that he was not even that conservative.
He was anti-Cummunist but that is about it. He did try to appoint some conservatives to the supreme court but the left blocked him for the most part.
He defeated a left-wing congresswoman in 1948 to claim a seat in the House. They hated him for that, and never forgave him.
Once in the House, he went after communists in the government without reservation or apology.
They hated him for that too.
In fact, that was the reason!
That was more than enough to unleash the media dogs off on him.
Two words: Alger Hiss. Democrats, the Left, and other fellow travelers never forgave Nixon for going after Alger Hiss.
It had a lot to do with the Kennedy team. In 1960, there was much discussion of which candidate was more liberal or more conservative and whether there was really any difference. The Kennedy people played up the "class" angle. Kennedy was the noble young prince, and Nixon the crude churl. Somehow that meme stuck and liberals and the media didn't really ask themselves how and why they became supporters of the aristocratic principle in politics.
Of course, Hiss and McCarthy were also factors. The left couldn't forgive Nixon for Hiss and associated Nixon with McCarthy. The cartoonist Herblock was a link between the left and more orthodox Democrats. He had it in for Nixon for years and did what he could to make a Nixon-McCarthy association stick. Herblock portrayed Nixon as a vicious partisan mudslinger in part perhaps because he was that way himself, and the repeated sting of his cartoons did a lot to make Nixon into just that kind of politician.
Nixon not that conservative? Liberals were riding high in the 1960s. They assumed that anybody who didn't go along 100% was standing in the way of progress and had to be defeated. Later on, conservatives got more confidence and liberals more timid, so conservatives could find Nixon wanting and liberals could accept the once despised Eisenhower (if not quite Nixon) as almost one of their own.