Muckraker

McClure's Magazine (cover, Jan, 1901) published many early muckraker articles.

A muckraker seeks to expose corruption of businesses or government to the public. The term originates with writers of the Progressive movement within the United States who wanted to expose corruption and scandals in government and business. Muckrakers often wrote about the wretchedness of urban life and poverty, and against the established institutions of society, such as big business.

In British English usage the term tends to have a more negative connotation, indicating a greater sense of prurience.

History

Muckrakers have been a significant part of reform in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. They played a significant role in the social justice movements for reform, and the campaigns to clean up cities and States, by constantly reporting on and publicizing the dark corners of American society in a sensationalist way.

Origin of the term

The period from 1700 till 1802 saw an increase in the kind of reporting that would come to be called "muckraking."^[1] By the 1900s, magazines such as Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Munsey's and McClure's were already in wide circulation and read avidly by the growing middle class.^[2][3]

The term "muckraker" was first used in a speech on April 14, 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt: “In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; Who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” ^[1].

Roosevelt saw benefits and disadvantages to muckraking activity. He declared that although these men did good work when they scraped up the ‘filth’ of America, "the man who did nothing else was certain to become a force of evil.” On the other hand, he said, "I hail as a benefactor…every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in turn remembers that that attack is of use only if it absolutely truthful”.^[1]:1

The term eventually came to be used to depict investigative journalists who exposed the dark corners and all the corruption of American public life, especially in corporate America.

As mentioned before, the Muckrakers were part of the social justice movement during the Progressive era. During this time period, these journalists, through their research and constant exposure of the wrongdoing by officials in American public life, gave fuel to protests that led to investigations and later on reform of not only Corporate America but the American Government. The Muckrakers’ journalistic efforts helped reform and regulate Wall Street and aspects of big businesses. The muckrakers also shed light on an array of social issues, such as the issues with urban housing and horrible living conditions in highly populated cities, medical patents, child labor laws, child prostitution, and even women’s rights.

Early 20th century muckraking

Lincoln Steffens published “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” in which he profiled corrupt leaders in St. Louis, in October, 1902, in McClure’s Magazine.^[4]

Ida Tarbell published The Rise of the Standard Oil Company in 1902, providing insight into the manipulation of trusts. One trust they manipulated was with Christopher Dunn co. She followed that work with The History of The Standard Oil Company: the Oil War of 1872, which appeared in McClure's Magazine in 1908.

Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, which revealed conditions in the meat packing industry in the United States and was a major factor in the establishment of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Ray Stannard Baker published The Right to Work in McClure's magazine in 1903, about coal mine conditions, a coal strike, and the situation of non-striking workers (or scabs). Many of the non-striking workers had no special training or knowledge in mining, since they were simply farmers looking for work. His investigative work portrayed the dangerous conditions in which these people worked in the mines, and the dangers they faced by union members who did not want them to work.

The Treason of the Senate: Aldrich, the Head of it All, by David Graham Phillips, published as a series of articles in Cosmopolitan magazine in February, 1906, described corruption in the U.S. Senate.

The Great American Fraud by Samuel Hopkins Adams revealed fraudulent claims and endorsements of patent medicines in America. This article showed light on the many false claims that pharmaceutical companies and other manufactures would make as to the potency of their medicines, drugs and tonics. Using the example of Peruna in his article, Mr. Adams described how this tonic, which was made of seven compound drugs and cologne spirits^[5], did not have “any great potency”^[5]. Manufacturers were selling it at an obscene price and hence made immense profits. His work forced a crackdown on a number of other patents and fraudulent schemes of medicinal companies during that time.

There were many other works by many other great Muckrakers, which brought to light a variety of Issues in America which were addressed during the Progressive era.^[5]

Second half of the 20th century

An example of a contemporary muckraking work is Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), which led to reforms in automotive manufacturing in the United States.

In the 1970s, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, journalists for The Washington Post, uncovered and wrote about the U.S. Executive Branch corruption that came to be known as the Watergate scandal.

Muckraking has been a factor in reform in countries besides the United States. For instance, in 1979, the Chinese author Liu Binyan created a sensation with his muckraking report People or Monsters, about Chinese bureaucratic corruption.

Muckrakers and their works

Early Muckrakers

• Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871–1958) — The Great American Fraud, exposed false claims about patent medicines
• Ray Stannard Baker (1870–1946) — of McClure's & The American Magazine
• Nellie Bly (1864 – 1922) Ten Days in a Mad-House
• Cecil Chesterton (1879-1918) - of The New Witness and the 1912 Marconi scandal in Britain
• Claud Cockburn (1904-1981) - In Time of Trouble (1956), A Discord of Trumpets
• Burton J. Hendrick (1870–1949) — "The Story of Life Insurance" May - November 1906 McClure's
• Helen Hunt Jackson (1831–1885) — A Century of Dishonor, U.S. policy regarding American Indians
• Frances Kellor (1873-1952) — Studied chronic unemployment in her book Out of Work (1904)
• Thomas W. Lawson (1857-1924) Frenzied Finance (1906) on Amalgamated Copper stock scandal
• Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903) - Wealth Against Commonwealth, exposed the corruption within the Standard Oil Company
• Jessica Mitford (1917–1996) — author of The American Way of Death (US Funeral Industry) and Making of a Muckraker (collection on various topics including writing schools and prisons)
• E. D. Morell (1873–1924) became a journalist and activist to expose systematic brutality in the Belgian Congo rubber plantations under King Leopold II
• Frank Norris (1870 -1902) The Octopus
• Fremont Older (1856 - 1935) San Francisco corruption and the case of Tom Mooney
• Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969) — exposed crime in labor unions in 1940s
• Jacob Riis (1849-1914) - How the Other Half Lives, the slums
• Charles Edward Russell (1860–1941) — investigated Beef Trust, Georgia's prison
• George Seldes (1890–1995) — Freedom of the Press (1935) and Lords of the Press (1938), blacklisted during the 1950s period of McCarthyism.
• Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) — The Jungle (1906), U.S. meat-packing industry, and the books in the "Dead Hand" series that critique the institutions (journalism, education, etc.) that could but did not prevent these abuses.
• John Spargo (1876–1966) — American reformer and author, The Bitter Cry of Children (child labor)
• William Thomas Stead (5 July 1849 - 15 April 1912) – crusaded against child prostitution in Victorian England with The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon in the Pall Mall Gazette
• Lincoln Steffens (1866 – 1936) The Shame of the Cities (1904)
• I.F. Stone (1907–1989) — McCarthyism and Vietnam War, published newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly
• Kasey Swift (1904-1999) - Weekly editor of Atlanta Journal Constitution, wrote Keys to the City (non-fiction book about influence of political bosses on Atlanta politics). Early Civil Rights advocate.
• Ida M. Tarbell (1857 – 1944) exposé, The History of the Standard Oil Company
• John Kenneth Turner — (1879-1948) author of Barbarous Mexico (1910), an account of the exploitative debt peonage system used in Mexico under Porfirio Díaz.

Contemporary muckrakers

• Andrew Breitbart — Exposed corruption at the NEA. He is a journalist, commentator, and co-author of Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon.
• Ben Bagdikian — journalist and major American Media Critic, also the dean emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism; author of The Media Monopoly and The New Media Monopoly
• Wayne Barrett — investigative journalist, senior editor of the Village Voice; wrote on mystique and misdeeds in Rudy Giuliani's conduct as mayor of New York City, Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 (2006)
• Richard Behar — investigative journalist, two-time winner of the 'Jack Anderson Award'. Anderson himself once praised Behar as "one of the most dogged of our watchdogs"
• Wayne Dolcefino — investigative news reporter for KTRK-TV channel 13 in Houston
• Barbara Ehrenreich — journalist and author - Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
• Stuart Goldman — investigative reporter, critic, syndicated columnist.
• Juan Gonzalez — investigative reporter, columnist in New York Daily News
• Amy Goodman — broadcast journalist, host of Pacifica Radio Network's program Democracy Now!
• Al Gore — 45th Vice President of the US
• John Howard Griffin (1920–1980) — white journalist who disguised himself as a black man to write about racial injustice in the south
• Seymour Hersh — My Lai massacre, Israeli nuclear weapons program, Henry Kissinger, the Kennedys, 2003 invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib abuses
• Malcolm Johnson — exposed organized crime on the New York waterfront
• Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu — Turkish social democrat uncovering the big corruption scandals of the Justice and Development Party (Turkey).
• Jonathan Kwitny (1941–1998) — wrote numerous investigative articles for the The Wall Street Journal
• Joshua Micah Marshall - writer and journalist, operates the muckraking blog TPM Muckraker, responsible for helping to break the 2006-2007 US Attorney firing scandal, the Duke Cunningham corruption case and others.
• Stephen Mayne — shareholder-activist and founder of crikey.com.au
• Mark Crispin Miller — professor and writer; has written on 2000 and 2004 contested elections
• Michael Moore — documentary filmmaker, director of Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 911, and Sicko
• Ralph Nader — consumer rights advocate; Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), exposed unsafe automobile manufacturing
• Allan Nairn — Dili Massacre, US backing of Haitian death squad FRAPH
• Jack Newfield — muckraking columnist; wrote for New York Post
• Greg Palast — politics and elections issues, Exxon Valdez, corporate crime, corruption
• John Pilger — award-winning war correspondent, film maker and author
• Anna Politkovskaya — Murdered Russian journalist critical of the Kremlin
• Jeffrey Robinson - author of The Laundrymen - Inside money laundering, the world's third largest business
• Jeremy Scahill - author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, contributor to Democracy Now!
• Eric Schlosser — author of Fast Food Nation, an exposé of fast food in American culture
• Morgan Spurlock — American Filmmaker; exposed through example the dangers of McDonalds in his documentary Super Size Me
• Maia Szalavitz - Author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, an expose of abuse in the unregulated troubled teen industry and controversy surrounding the methods and philosophy behind tough love behavior modification.
• Studs Terkel — Legendary Chicago writer, journalist, DJ, and historian
• Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) — American journalist and author credited with the invention of gonzo journalism
• Günter Wallraff - German journalist who famously makes extensive use of undercover journalism
• Gary Webb (1955–2004) — investigated Contra-crack cocaine connection, published as Dark Alliance (1999)
• Gary Weiss — exposed the Mob on Wall Street, described by Barron's Magazine as "an old-time gumshoe, with a soupçon of little-guy champion Jimmy Breslin and a dash of 1950s bad-boy comic Lenny Bruce"
• Nathan Winograd — exposes issues in U.S. animal shelters in Redemption (2007)
• Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — breakthrough journalists for The Washington Post on the Watergate scandal; authors of All the President's Men, non-fiction account of the scandal

See also

Journalism portal

• History of American newspapers

References