What was muckraking journalism

New York: St. Biggers argues that Anne Royall was an early muckraker and attempts to restore her to a place in the history of US muckraking. She also tackled religious bigotry and the anti-Masonic prejudice of the early 19th century. Like the muckrakers who followed her, Royall covered prison conditions and the big banks and published numerous books.

Cassady, Edward E. Muckraking in the Gilded Age. American Literature DOI: Cassady argues against the characterization of the media as complacent in Gilded Age corruption, highlighting several significant pieces that skewered government and corporations of the era.

Media versus special interests. Dyck and colleagues studied voting patterns during the muckraker era and found that the reporting had a statistically significant effect on voting records in the house and Senate. The work of these authors confirmed what many had taken as an article of faith and provides the most compelling statistical evidence of impact.

Filler, Louis. The muckrakers. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Written within living memory of the muckraking movement, this book has an enormous amount of context about contemporary politics and cultural life and how the muckrakers fit into the debates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Also includes details on the response to their reporting. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses the way in which President Teddy Roosevelt used the press to further his reform agenda and his relationship with muckraking reporters. McKitrick, Eric L. Commentary July : 85— This review of an anthology of muckraking journalism, written by a noted historian, sums up much of the thinking of the muckraking era and puts it in the context of the United States after the Civil War.

The muckrakers were the heart of Progressivism, that shifting coalition of sentiment striving to make the American dream come true in the machine age. Their articles, with facts borne out by subsequent commissions, were read passionately in new national mass-circulation magazines by millions of the fast-growing aspiring white-collar middle class.

President Theodore Roosevelt responded to investigative journalism by initiating legislation that would help tackle some of the problems illustrated by these journalist. Roosevelt was seen to be on the side of these investigative journalists until David Graham Phillips began a series of articles in Cosmopolitan entitled The Treason in the Senate. This included an attack on some of Roosevelt's political allies and he responded with a speech where he compared the investigative journalist with the muckraker in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress : "the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth on the floor.

These investigative journalists objected to being described as muckrakers. They felt betrayed as they felt they had helped President Theodore Roosevelt to get elected. Lincoln Steffens was furious with Roosevelt and the day after the speech told him: "Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you. After Roosevelt's speech these investigative journalists became known as muckrakers.

David Graham Phillips believed that Roosevelt's speech marked the end of the movement: "The greatest single definite force against muckraking was President Roosevelt, who called these writers muckrakers. A tag like that running through the papers was an easy phrase of repeated attack upon what was in general a good journalistic movement. Ray Stannard Baker argued: "In the beginning I thought, and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods.

They are moral and economic questions. Latterly I believe Roosevelt did a disservice to the country in seizing upon a movement that ought to have been built up slowly and solidly from the bottom with much solid thought and experimentation, and hitching it to the cart of his own political ambitions.

He thus short-circuited a fine and vigorous current of aroused public opinion into a futile partisan movement. Some of the magazines such as Everybody's , McClure's Magazine , and the American Magazine continued to publish investigations into political, legal and financial corruption.

However, as John O'Hara Cosgrave, editor of Everybody's admitted, the demand for this type of journalism declined: "The subject was not exhausted but the public interest therein seemed to be at an end, and inevitably the editors turned to other sources of copy to fill their pages.

In his book, The Era of the Muckrakers , C. Regier argued that it is possible to tabulate the achievements of investigative journalism during this period: "The list of reforms accomplished between and is an impressive one. The convict and peonage systems were destroyed in some states; prison reforms were undertaken; a federal pure food act was passed in ; child labour laws were adopted by many states; a federal employers' liability act was passed in , and a second one in , which was amended in ; forest reserves were set aside; the Newlands Act of made reclamation of millions of acres of land possible; a policy of the conservation of natural resources was followed; eight-hour laws for women were passed in some states; race-track gambling was prohibited; twenty states passed mothers' pension acts between and ; twenty-five states had workmen's compensation laws in ; an income tax amendment was added to the Constitution; the Standard Oil and the Tobacco companies were dissolved; Niagara Falls was saved from the greed of corporations; Alaska was saved from the Guggenheims and other capitalists; and better insurance laws and packing-house laws were placed on the statute books.

The situation changed dramatically after the First World War because of what became known as the Red Scare. The man considered to be the "godfather" of muckraking journalism, Lincoln Steffens , had great difficulty finding magazines willing to publish his work. He told Ella Winter , "I don't seem able to state my truths so that they'll be accepted. Their reporting generated concern among members of the public and lawmakers, and in some cases, led to laws that addressed the problems they were covering.

In other cases, problems were exposed but the groundswell of emotion led to little change. The investigative techniques of the muckrakers included poring over documents, conducting countless interviews, and going undercover.

This differed from yellow journalism, where some leading newspapers sensationalized stories using imagination rather than facts. In several cases, muckrakers became activists themselves and spent years speaking throughout the country about their work and the need for reform. The term muckraking was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in , describing the crusading journalists who wrote stories in late nineteenth-century publications.

Roosevelt criticized journalists he thought focused too much on exposing corruption in business and government and not reporting on more positive news. Journalists of the time largely took the term as a compliment and adopted it as a badge of honor for exposing misconduct. Ida Tarbell was born on the oil frontier of western Pennsylvania in She was among the first women to graduate from Allegheny College in It was a landmark work of the journalism that became known as "muckraking.

Muckrakers From Ohio History Central. Jump to: navigation , search. McGerr, Michael. Sinclair, Upton.