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muckraker love

muckraker

Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A person who habitually muckrakes.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun US One who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that often violate widely held values; e.g. one who exposes political corruption or the poor conditions in prisons.
  • noun UK A sensationalist, scandal-mongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.
  • noun US, historical One of a group of American investigative reporters, novelists and critics of the Progressive Era (the 1890s to the 1920s)

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun one who spreads real or alleged scandal about another (usually for political advantage)

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Believed to have been coined following a 1906 speech by United States President Theodore Roosevelt, in which he likened the investigative journalist to ‘the Man with the Muck-rake’, a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

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Examples

  • He was what they described as a muckraker earlier.

    The Strange Deaths of President Harding 1997

  • Sort of like what the TPM muckraker is to Talking Points Memo.

    Think Progress » Karl Rove attacks the blogosphere. 2006

  • Of the school of earnest young writers at whom the word muckraker had been thrown in opprobrium, and by whom it had been caught up as a title of honor, Everett was among the younger and less conspicuous.

    Once Upon A Time Richard Harding Davis 1890

  • And Ida Tarbell, a new kind of journalist -- a prototype of what later would be called a muckraker and later still an investigative reporter -- was preparing to launch a series of excoriating profiles of Rockefeller's business practices that would eventually alter his own fate and his company's.

    A Reporter at the Ramparts 2008

  • David Graham Phillips, a novelist as well as a muckraking journalist his 1906 Cosmopolitan series on "The Treason of the Senate" inspired Teddy Roosevelt to coin "muckraker" in its journalistic sense had the material element in mind when he wrote in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise:

    Hugh Rawson: Chasing the American Dream Hugh Rawson 2010

  • David Graham Phillips, a novelist as well as a muckraking journalist his 1906 Cosmopolitan series on "The Treason of the Senate" inspired Teddy Roosevelt to coin "muckraker" in its journalistic sense had the material element in mind when he wrote in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise:

    Hugh Rawson: Chasing the American Dream Hugh Rawson 2010

  • David Graham Phillips, a novelist as well as a muckraking journalist his 1906 Cosmopolitan series on "The Treason of the Senate" inspired Teddy Roosevelt to coin "muckraker" in its journalistic sense had the material element in mind when he wrote in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise:

    Hugh Rawson: Chasing the American Dream Hugh Rawson 2010

  • I suppose the "muckraker" guys just can't wait for all the muck a Clinton presidency is guaranteed to bring.

    Two Obama Ads Are Criticized 2009

  • I suppose the "muckraker" guys just can't wait for all the muck a Clinton presidency is guaranteed to bring.

    Two Obama Ads Are Criticized 2009

  • Not only does her surprise display a stunning lack of basic education about the history of the very journalism profession she works in (Leslie - please google the terms "muckraker" and "penny press"), her own 60 Minutes piece about Dobbs displays her own very subjective opinions.

    Lou Dobbs Challenges The Great Objectivity Scam 2007

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