The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock. Others, including Lincoln Steffens, exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck.Robert Miraldi, ed. The Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders (Praeger, 2000).Stein, Harry H. "American Muckrakers and Muckraking: The 50-Year Scholarship", Journalism Quarterly, (1979) 56#1 pp 9–17.
The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel and Brand Whitlock. Others, including Lincoln Steffens, exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck.Robert Miraldi, ed. The Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders (Praeger, 2000).Stein, Harry H. "American Muckrakers and Muckraking: The 50-Year Scholarship", Journalism Quarterly, (1979) 56#1 pp 9–17.