muckrakers

Cultural  

1. Authors who specialize in exposing corruption in business, government, and elsewhere, especially those who were active at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Some famous muckrakers were Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with giving them their name.

---

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

muckrakers

Politicians, activists, muckrakers and Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe” collide in a metropolitan epic centered, Wolfe writes, “where things are happening.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026

In the early 1900s, journalism, the muckrakers, became highly influential, raising awareness about many social ills, including child labor, unsafe working conditions and unsanitary food processing.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 2, 2025

Local muckrakers seem to keep their eyes peeled for sinister colors at construction sites.

From Slate ● Apr. 19, 2022

Faced with a morass of impenetrable documents and intractable officials they took matters into their own hands and uncovered the crime of the new century by becoming internet muckrakers, using crowd-sourcing and social media.

From Salon ● May 19, 2016

"We're just human beings, you know—even if the ministers and the muckrakers do accuse us of being blood brothers to the devil and Ali Baba."

From Traffic in Souls A Novel of Crime and Its Cure by Ball, Eustace Hale