Muckraking

Muckraking is one of those things where most people have heard about it but don’t really know exactly what it is. I would define muckraking as a style of investigative journalism that seeks to expose incidents of political corruption, government wrongdoing, or social injustice for the purpose of altering public policy. Basically all this is just fancy lingo for journalists who seek to bring up the dirt on either the government, high ranking individuals, or companies in order to get change it for the better good. But exactly how successful is this practice and how exactly is it done????

There are three distinct paths to political action through muckraking. Journalists may write up articles about public policies in order of engaging the public, or to bring the situation to light. This will hopefully spark a reaction that will call for change. This was done a lot with corruption, child labor, public health and safety actions throughout history. Journalists will also write an article in hopes of urging politicians to make change. What better way to get something done than through an elite politician? The last way that journalists employ muckraking is through teamwork. Journalists team up and coordinate stories to gain support of various political activities.
There you have it, it’s easy to understand why muckraking is successful if you know how it is used and what it is. But the question that still remains to be answered is how does muckraking actually work. Here is a great illustration given to me through Professor Dewitt:
Policy consequences

Journalistic Investigation ----> Publication ----> Public Opinion ---->Policy Initiatives


This model is such a great illustration because it portrays accurately a starting and ending point. Muckraking begins with investigative journalism. As discussed earlier, this is done in order to change political attitudes or public policy. The next step is publication—In order for people to hear the message, it has to be published. What good is good investigative journalism is no one sees it? The next step is public opinion- how the public feels about the investigative journalism. Does it spark anger, sympathy, apathy, sadness, or nothing at all? If the public isn’t moved by the investigation then the politician ns aren’t going to do anything about it. This leads us to our next step, policy initiative. This is where the policy begins to take root and things begin to get done.

At the end of the day, there is a lot of work that goes into investigative journalism. It fits perfectly into the hard news scene and is even appreciated by the public. Why then does it seem that there is less and less investigative journalism than in the past? In my opinion it’s because there is such a demand for soft news and quick reporting that the journalists aren’t pushed to investigate. Let’s face it, all good things take time, and time just isn’t what reporters today have. Hopefully the media industry will notice how important muckraking is to us as a nation, and all the good things that can come out of it.