USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1901-1908, nicknamed these investigative journalists muckrakers. He borrowed the term from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, in which a rake was used to dig up filth and muck. The term caught on, and many journalists were proud to be considered muckrakers.

Detailed explanation-2: -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 1906, describing the crusading journalists who wrote stories in late nineteenth-century publications.

Detailed explanation-3: -Most of the muckrakers were journalists. Theodore Roosevelt gave the muckrakers their creative name. He compared them to someone stirring up the mud at the bottom of a pond. Progressives in Ohio and elsewhere used muckrakers’ writings to inspire and promote reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Detailed explanation-4: -The modern term generally references investigative journalism or watchdog journalism; investigative journalists in the US are occasionally called “muckrakers” informally.

Detailed explanation-5: -A muckraker was any of a group of American writers identified with pre-World War I reform and exposé writing. The muckrakers provided detailed, accurate journalistic accounts of the political and economic corruption and social hardships caused by the power of big business in a rapidly industrializing United States.