Muckraker  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

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.

Muckrakers and their works

Early Muckrakers

• Edwin Markham (1852-1940) - "published an exposé of child labor in Children in Bondage" (1914)
• 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
• Frank Norris (1870–1902) The Octopus
• Fremont Older (1856–1935) San Francisco corruption and the case of Tom Mooney
• 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
• Casey Swint (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

• Julian Assange — principal of the organization Wikileaks, which runs a website devoted to leaking secret documents and records.
• 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
• Donald Barlett and James Steele — longtime investigative reporting team, now with Vanity Fair.
• 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"
• Noam Chomsky - a high-level, observant, circumspect muckraker working within the academic landscape.
• CounterPunch Muckraking newsletter, published in the United States, edited by, among others, Andrew Cockburn
• 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!
• 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
• Jonathan Kwitny (1941–1998) — wrote numerous investigative articles for 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
• 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)
• 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"
• 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

• Whistleblower