Pardon Our Interruption

As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:

  • You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser.
  • You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed.
  • You've disabled cookies in your web browser.
  • A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. Additional information is available in this support article .

To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page.

The muckrakers played a pivotal role in initiating the Progressive Era, because they spurred everyday Americans to action. Unlike earlier sensationalist journalists, the muckrakers told their stories with the explicit goal of galvanizing their readers and encouraging them to take steps to address the issues. With photographs and descriptions of real-life scenarios of which many Americans were unaware, the muckrakers brought the tribulations of child factory workers, the urban poor, and others into the living rooms of the middle class.

Wilson’s actions were limited by his belief in his New Freedom platform, which promised voters a small government. Still, he took a number of steps in the first year of his presidency to shore up the economy and push back against destructive trusts. With those goals accomplished, he largely left the Progressive agenda alone. As the 1916 election season approached, however, Wilson realized that his hands-off policy was not endearing him to voters, and he ended his first term in a flurry of Progressive legislation that reminded the voting public of all he could do for them.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction
  • Authors: P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Sylvie Waskiewicz, Paul Vickery
  • Publisher/website: OpenStax
  • Book title: U.S. History
  • Publication date: Dec 30, 2014
  • Location: Houston, Texas
  • Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction
  • Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/chapter-21

© Jul 18, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

Classroom Logo

  • Teacher Opportunities
  • AP U.S. Government Key Terms
  • Bureaucracy & Regulation
  • Campaigns & Elections
  • Civil Rights & Civil Liberties
  • Comparative Government
  • Constitutional Foundation
  • Criminal Law & Justice
  • Economics & Financial Literacy
  • English & Literature
  • Environmental Policy & Land Use
  • Executive Branch
  • Federalism and State Issues
  • Foreign Policy
  • Gun Rights & Firearm Legislation
  • Immigration
  • Interest Groups & Lobbying
  • Judicial Branch
  • Legislative Branch
  • Political Parties
  • Science & Technology
  • Social Services
  • State History
  • Supreme Court Cases
  • U.S. History
  • World History

Log-in to bookmark & organize content - it's free!

  • Bell Ringers
  • Lesson Plans
  • Featured Resources

Bell Ringers

Bell Ringer: Muckrakers

Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses muckrakers.

Description

Historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses muckrakers.

Bell Ringer Assignment

  • How did the term ‘muckraker’ originate?
  • Explain Ms. Goodwin’s reasoning on modern day muckrakers and how they compare to muckrakers in the past.

Additional Resources

The 1830s saw a change in the newspaper business model. People began to experiment with publishing inexpensive newspapers that were filled with content that catered to the middle class. Their goal was to appeal to the masses, so they adopted a conversational style of writing and produced daily news stories that were entertaining and update-to-date. The Penny Press greatly impacted the world of newspapers and their effects can be seen today.

Historian Vincent DiGirolamo talked about what life was like for newspaper boys both in the cities and on the railroads in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Participants

  • Edward Snowden
  • General Stanley Mcchrystal
  • Michael Hastings
  • Samuel Mcclure
  • Theodore Roosevelt

Resources: Discussions and Assignments

Module 5 discussion: muckraking.

From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States experienced significant growth and change. Wrapped up in these changes produced by industrialization and immigration, there were new political, social, and economic challeges, including poor living and working conditions in growing cities, political corruption, and demands for gender equality and agrarian reform.

Muckrackers, or investigative journalists and photographers, paved the way for societal changes by spreading awareness of some of these issues in need of reform. They reported about corporate monopolies and political machines, urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, prostitution, alcohol abuse, mental health issues, child labor, and more. Prominent muckrakers of the Progressive era include:

  • Samuel Hopkins Adams
  • Paul Y. Anderson
  • Ray Stannard Baker
  • Ambrose Bierce
  • Louis D. Brandeis
  • Marion Hamilton Carter
  • Julius Chambers
  • B.O. Flower
  • Burton J. Hendrick
  • Helen Hunt Jackson
  • Frances Kellor
  • Thomas William Lawson
  • Henry Demarest Lloyd
  • Edwin Markham
  • Gustavus Myers
  • Frank Norris
  • Fremont Older
  • Drew Pearson
  • Charles Edward Russell
  • Upton Sinclair
  • John Spargo
  • Lincoln Steffens
  • Ida M. Tarbell
  • John Kenneth Turner
  • Ida B. Wells

Step 1 : Fill out a table describing a historical or modern issue that was or is important to muckrackers and activists. You can pick Option 1 or Option 2.

Option 1 : Choose one of the muckrakers above. Do some research to find out more about the person, the issue they publicized, and what, if anything, came of it. For this assignment, it’s okay to use Wikipedia or other simple secondary sources, but do not copy from them verbatim. Fill in each section with your own words. Include the URLs to your sources in the table.

Make a copy of the table below and fill it in with information about your chosen muckraker and issue. The first two rows require just a few words or short responses, but the last two responses should be summarized in a paragraph or two. Keep it informative, but simple.

Problem or issue in society
Muckraker reporting on the issue
Summary of reporting
Resulting reform or impact
Sources

Option 2 : Fill out a similar chart to that in Option 1, but for a modern-day issue. For this, you don’t necessarily need to highlight an investigate journalist, but you can pick an activist who is working to spread awarness about an issue.

Problem or issue in society
Investigative journalist or activist reporting or raising awareness about the issue
Summary of reporting or of their activism (include link to an article or example)
Resulting or suggested reform or impact
Sources

Worked Example

Problem or issue in society Climate change—specifically that we are not acting quickly enough to prevent accelerated climate change.
Investigative journalist or activist reporting or raising awareness about the issue Greta Thunberg
Summary of reporting or of their activism (include link to an article or example) Greta began her climate change activism at age 15 with a school climate strike by spending her time protesting outside of the Swedish parliament. As her popularity grew, similar strikes were orchestrated around the world. She first challenged her own family to lower their carbon footprint by becoming vegan, upcycling, and giving up flying, which she has encouraged others to do as well. In 2019, she gave a speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit, in which she famously said, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” She said that cutting emissions by half in ten years is not aggressive enough, and we need to take dramatic measures to stay below 1.5 degrees.

Resulting or suggested reform or impact Thunberg’s activism has led to increased awareness and activism, especially among youth, known as the “Greta Effect.” Her influence has been strong particularly in Europe, where more Green party candidates have been elected to parliaments and politically addressing climate change has become a priority. Greta has suggested reducing emissions by 80% and acting on climage change before we run out of time.
Sources

Step 3 : Post your completed table into the discussion forum.

Step 4 : Respond to two classmates in the thread by making connections between their table and another era. If they chose a historical topic, respond with a modern connection. For example, if they wrote about Ida Tarbell, in your response, try to connect the work that Tarbell did to something equivalent in today’s world. Since Tarbell was known for writing about the Standard Oil Company and breaking that up, consider if there are other examples of people or activists reporting about monopolies or businesses today. You can be creative in these connections. If your classmate chose a modern topic, reply with a connection to progressive-era muckraking activites. For example, Greta Thunberg wrote about climate change today, but John Muir called for the importance of land preservation in the 1890s.

Your response posts should be at least a paragraph and should try to extend, complicate, or redirect the original poster’s points in a substantive, knowledge-demonstrating way. As always, if there are ideas from the assigned reading that seem relevant, be sure to bring those into the discussion.

Responds to prompt Response is superficial, lacking in thoughtful analysis or critique. Contributes few novel ideas, connections, or applications. Provides an accurate response to the prompt, but the information delivered is limited or lacking in analysis. Provides a  thoughtful and clear response to the content or question asked. The response includes original thoughts and novel ideas. __/4
Supporting Details Includes vague or incomplete supporting evidence or fails to support opinions with facts. Supports opinions with the required number of detailed factual responses, though connections may be unclear, not firmly established, or explicit. Supports response with required evidence; makes connections to the course content and/or other experiences. Cites evidence when appropriate. __/2
Comments and participation Provides brief responses or shows little effort to participate in the learning community. Responds kindly and builds upon the comments from others, but may lack depth, detail, and/or explanation. Kindly and thoroughly extend discussions already taking place or poses new possibilities or opinions not previously voiced. Response is substantive and constructive. __/4
Total __/10
  • Module 5 Discussion: Muckraking. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
  • Muckraker. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker#Muckrakers_and_their_works . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Pardon Our Interruption

As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:

  • You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser.
  • You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed.
  • You've disabled cookies in your web browser.
  • A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. Additional information is available in this support article .

To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page.

American University Magazine American

American university magazine.

4400 Mass Ave July 2019

Modern-day Muckrakers

Typewriter keys spelling out modern-day muckrakers

When Waynesville, Missouri’s Daily Guide folded in 2018, it took a piece of the city’s soul with it. In a flash, there were no more theater reviews, no community events coverage, no high school football recaps. 

Waynesville, a town of 4,800 in the heart of the Ozarks, is now down to just one set of eyes and ears—former Daily Guide scribe Darrell Todd Maurina, who live-blogs county commissioners meetings, monitors the police scanner, and posts articles to the free, online-only Pulaski County Daily News .  

“Somebody needs to pick up the slack and, at least in this community, I’m able to do that,” Maurina told the Houston Herald, a weekly paper based in neighboring Texas County, Missouri, in April.  

Other news deserts—cities in which no one is covering school board meetings, scrubbing budget proposals, or scrutinizing political candidates—aren’t as lucky. The loss of a local rag tugs on the heartstrings and, it turns out, the purse strings. A 2018 study by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago found that in communities where a newspaper had closed, merged, or cut its print schedule, municipal borrowing costs rose—in some cases burdening taxpayers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional interest over the life of a bond.  

“The economic collapse of the advertiser and subscription financial model has decimated local media, mostly newspapers. A lot of towns wake up every day realizing there’s no one covering their government, empowering whistleblowers, or keeping an eye on things,” says Jeffrey Rutenbeck, former dean of the School of Communication (SOC), who stepped down in June. “That sparks a kind of soul-searching, and not just within the industry. I think you have citizens who are worried about how things will turn out.” 

With more papers going the way of the Daily Guide , nonprofit journalism outlets—mostly digital publications that are funded by individual donors and foundations, not ads and subscriptions—are filling the void. SOC’s Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) is among them.   

Over the last 10 years, IRW staffers, including 160 student employees, have written 200 stories, launched about 80 investigations into topics as varied as commercial kangaroo hunting and the disappearance of Trump-branded goods, partnered with more than a dozen media outlets, and forged an affiliation with the nation’s only university-based Frontline crew. Along the way, the workshop has also racked up 26 awards and $16 million in funding.  

“I’m not saying it’s solved everything,” says Chuck Lewis, IRW’s founder and executive editor, “but these nonprofits have helped immensely.” 

From low-circulation weeklies to large metro dailies, papers have been hemorrhaging jobs for decades. Between 1990 and 2016, the number of newspaper positions plummeted 60 percent from 458,000 to 183,000, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics—largely the result of print advertising revenues nosediving and digital revenues not rising fast enough to offset them. A recent Wall Street Journal report estimates that 1,800 newspapers folded from 2004 to 2018.  

As resources are cut and staff are eliminated, newsrooms are ill-equipped to meet the demands of lengthy investigative projects and watchdog work. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center study, 21 states do not have a single reporter covering their congressional delegation in Washington. 

But amid endless industry cutbacks, the country’s 200 nonprofit news organizations—about half of which have sprouted up in the last decade—are providing a glimmer of hope. Like IRW, the mission of most of these outlets, which boast combined annual funding of $350 million, is to dig into investigative stories that might otherwise slip through the cracks.  

“A lot of philanthropic foundations and individuals came to see that if you didn’t have information, you don’t have a democracy,” says Lewis, who joined SOC as a professor in 2006. “It’s that direct and that blunt.” 

Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. playfully calls the 65-year-old Lewis the “father or grandfather” of nonprofit journalism in the US—“depending on what you want to say about his age.” But Lewis’s roots in the field exude the garage vibes of a tech startup. He left his job as a producer for Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in 1989, launching the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) from the guest bedroom of his house in Reston, Virginia, with two friends. One of the first news nonprofits in the country—after the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones —CPI quickly outgrew the confines of Lewis’s cul-de-sac and relocated to an office two blocks from the White House, where it expanded to more than 40 staff.  

In its first 15 years, the foundation-funded CPI produced 14 books, was threatened with 20 lawsuits (and slapped with three real ones, all dismissed), won 35 national journalism awards, and yielded more than a few 80- to 100-hour work weeks for Lewis. He was intrigued by the educational power of investigative journalism, siccing eager, young newshounds on the raw data that spawns a reporting project. But rather than uproot CPI and move it to AU, he signed a three-year contract with the university to help develop SOC’s investigative journalism curriculum and launch a news nonprofit staffed mostly by students.  

“The question was: What do we do to make sure that a new generation gets [journalism], knows it, loves it, and wants to do it?” Lewis recalls. “I wanted to figure out a way where we could do investigative reporting with students so they could have bylines that would help them get jobs and delve into subjects that most [reporters] didn’t have time to.” 

IRW’s first office—an inconspicuous space atop Chef Geoff’s restaurant on New Mexico Avenue, a few blocks southeast of campus—looked more Sam Spade than Sy Hersh. And like any diligent detective agency, IRW initially grappled with which leads to follow.  

“Before Christmas of ’08 until 2011, I think we were very much racing against the clock, both to figure out what we could do and what we should be doing and how to carve out a role within the university,” managing editor and SOC journalist in residence Lynne Perri says. “Those years, especially, felt very startup to me.” 

Building relationships with other news organizations, figuring out how to best involve students, and fine-tuning fundraising efforts took years, but IRW set the bar for impact with its first story. Wendell Cochran, former director of SOC’s journalism program and senior editor at IRW, compiled data on the health of 16,000 financial institutions—8,000 banks and 8,000 credit unions—in the aftermath of the Great Recession. BankTracker, a search tool published in partnership with msnbc.com in March 2009 and updated quarterly, was an overnight hit, registering 50,000 of them in the first day alone.  

The night before the piece dropped, Lewis fretted about a threatening letter he received from the American Bankers Association, but then SOC dean Larry Kirkman assured him of IRW’s independence.  

“He sent a note back literally 60 seconds later,” Lewis says.  

Congratulations and good luck . 

A poster outside IRW’s new office—a bright corner space on the first floor of the McKinley Building—asks of workshop alumni: Where are they now? The photos of smiling reporters include the posts at which they landed after graduation: Washington and Huffington , among others.  

Perri keeps an Excel spreadsheet of IRW’s 160 undergraduate and graduate alumni—reporters, photographers, videographers, and designers—and estimates that about 90 percent have stayed in the journalism business. Their time at IRW is usually brief, with public affairs journalism master’s students arriving in July and leaving the following June, but productive.  

Mandy McLaren, SOC/MA ’17, returned to school after seven years as a special education teacher in New Orleans, hoping to parlay her life experiences into a deeper understanding of the sources and subjects on which she wanted to report. Her desire to touch children’s lives had two potential paths: either stay in New Orleans and become a principal, or dust off the journalism instincts she developed as an undergrad and tell kids’ stories.  

“The naive optimist in me decided to go with path B,” McLaren says. “I hadn’t touched journalism in seven years, and I knew that to get to a position where I could make an impact quickly, I needed help. I needed to build connections and I needed to find a place where I could accelerate my professional development.” 

A natural starting point was the classroom. While taking an international reporting class with Lewis, McLaren pitched a story on San Diego school districts’ approach to refugee students, many of whom arrive in the US unable to speak English and carrying the trauma of war. Lewis folded the story into IRW, teaming McLaren up with an education reporter at Investigative Newsource, a San Diego-based nonprofit outlet. IRW paid for her travel and gave her time to approach the story with care and nuance often lacking in education reporting. “The New Americans” was published   in July 2017.  

“Unless you have a scandal, the day-to-day minutiae of how schools work might not be as sexy and click-worthy,” says McLaren, now an education reporter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. “But they’re really, really important for the future of our country.” 

A more personal experience inspired Caroline Stetler’s first IRW piece. Stetler, SOC/MA ’09, was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer at age 16; she made a full recovery but still wondered about the disease’s causes. 

In Lewis’s investigative reporting class, the former Golf Digest reporter began digging into documents and statistics, including National Cancer Institute data that revealed increased rates of thyroid cancer among women. She interviewed experts on the disease and patients who battled through it, transforming a class assignment into a seven-part IRW series with multimedia components. Her scoop was the first to ask several important questions about thyroid cancer and was the nonprofit’s first-ever student-produced investigation.  

Stetler stayed at IRW for an additional fellowship year, exploring nationwide X-ray licensing and standards and contributing to a 2010 story about the nuclear energy lobby, copublished with McClatchy newspapers.  

“It was like a light went on,” says Stetler, now a medical grant writer in Florida. “My confidence grew the more I was able to rely on documents. If you have the hard evidence, you have the story.” 

Teaching the finer points of investigative reporting through practice can be a delicate dance. Students, even those with professional journalism backgrounds, are still learning and mistakes are inevitable. At the same time, they’re working on stories that touch on serious subjects.  

By expanding its network to WAMU 88.5, the Post , and other media outlets, IRW has given students an opportunity to learn firsthand about the legwork required to build an investigative series. John Sullivan, who won a Pulitzer Prize with the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2012 for a series on violence in the city’s public schools, was hired in 2013 to wear three hats: Washington Post investigative reporter, SOC investigative reporter in residence, and IRW senior editor—thus establishing a publishing pipeline between IRW and the Post . 

Each year, Sullivan invites six to eight graduate students to spend a year in the Post newsroom as part of his practicum course. Much of the first semester is spent on research—working the phones, tracking down documents and data, and negotiating down the price of public records—and the second is devoted to working with Post reporters and writing their own stories.  

Over the last two years, eight practicum students, many of them also IRW interns, worked with reporter Kimbriell Kelly, mapping more than 52,000 homicides for the Post ’s “Murder with Impunity” series, which was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in April. AU students have contributed to 20 major Post investigations and produced 100 of their own bylines. Derek Hawkins, SOC/MA ’16, now a full-time Post reporter, had one in the paper’s 2016 Pulitzer-winning series on fatal shootings by police.  

Students sit by Sullivan’s desk near the investigations team, and he treats them like colleagues. Their stories are real—appearing on the Post and IRW websites—as is their anxiety over wanting to get every last detail right for a national audience.  

“If you were to give an assignment for a student in a class to produce a story, often it’s half the information. They don’t really need to get that interview if they can’t. They don’t really need to make sure that every single point is perfect,” Sullivan says. “[At the Post ], you know that thing is going in the paper and you’re working around people who demonstrate for you every day how careful and thoughtful they are.” 

Lewis wonders more about the future of journalism over the next 10 years—and how people get their information—than that of IRW. 

There are profitable news outlets, but they’re rarer and concentrated in fewer hands than in the past, complicating today’s journalism ecosystem.  

More people are getting their news from nontraditional sources like Twitter and Facebook, and ignorance and disinformation are seemingly on the rise. An October 2016 ABC poll found that more than 40 percent of Americans couldn’t name either vice presidential candidate. A Pew study revealed that 64 percent of American adults feel fake news causes “a great deal of confusion” about the issues of the day, and that 23 percent had shared a fake news story, either knowingly or accidentally.  

In an era of fake versus fact, IRW’s mission is clear.  

“We’re not cartoonish here. We’re gonna do serious things for people that are literate, for God’s sake. We’re gonna play to people who are up-to-date on current affairs,” Lewis says. “My job is to stick with quality work, to teach a new generation and be supportive and to help get these folks placed. We want them to succeed in life, and we want them to investigate the bastards—whoever they are.” 

Ten years later, it’s still a pursuit worth writing about.  

INVESTIGATING WITH IMPACT

From the days of muckraking to modern-day enterprise journalism, ink on newsprint has kept the public in the know for centuries. And while reporting practices, writing styles, and access to data and technology have changed, the driving force behind investigative journalism—to educate, inform, expose, and influence—has not. Here are some of the most impactful investigations of the last 150 years. 

1871: The New York Times threw a wrench in the powerful Tammany Hall political machine when reporter John Foord exposed more than $50 million in city funds siphoned by “Boss” Tweed, who was prosecuted and sentenced in 1873.  

1887: Nellie Bly went undercover at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on what’s now Roosevelt Island to shed light on the widespread mistreatment of the mentally ill. Her New York World report, later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House , prompted increased funding for the Department of Public Charities and Corrections.  

1891: Ida B. Wells, the 25-year-old co-owner and editor of Free Speech and Headlight , a black newspaper in Memphis, traversed the South by herself, researching more than 700 lynchings. “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so,” wrote Wells, who also co-founded the NAACP in 1909. 

1902: McClure’s Magazine scribe Ida Tarbell exposed the monopoly abuses of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller in The History of the Standard Oil Company , published in 19 parts from 1902 to 1904. In 1909 the federal government prosecuted the company—then the world’s largest oil refinery—for violating antitrust laws; it was dismantled two   years later.   

1905: The Jungle is a fictional tale of immigrant labor in Chicago’s stockyards and slaughterhouses, but author Upton Sinclair reported the story like a journalist, spending seven weeks as a stockyard worker for background. Its impact was real, too. Published in installments in the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason in 1905 and as a book the following year, The Jungle featured graphic details about health violations and unsanitary practices that prompted Congress to pass the Federal Meat Inspection Act in 1906. 

1917: Following in Bly’s pioneering footsteps, reporter Harold Littledale spent several months in the “medieval” Trenton, New Jersey, prison documenting the inhumane treatment of inmates. Less than two weeks after the New York Evening Post published Littledale’s report, the New Jersey governor established a Prison Inquiry Commission. 

1930: Lawyer and salesman-turned-newshound A. B. Macdonald headed south to Amarillo, Texas, for the Kansas City Star to sniff out a story on a cold case murder, leading to a confession from the victim’s husband and the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting for Macdonald.  

1946: Penning 18 articles in six weeks, Baltimore Sun journalist Howard Norton detailed fraud in Maryland’s unemployment compensation system, leading to the conviction of 200 jobless-pay claimants and prompting major changes in the state’s unemployment benefits law. Norton won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1947.  

1949: George Thiem of the Chicago Daily News and Roy J. Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch teamed up to expose 51 “newspapermen” at 32 Illinois papers who took $480,000 in bribes from the state and penned editorials promoting the governor’s agenda. The two reporters spent more than two weeks cross-referencing 35,000 names on county payrolls with those on the papers’ mastheads. For their diligence and tenacity, they received the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. 

1952: Murrey Marder of the Washington Post did the legwork Senator Joseph McCarthy did not, exposing a series of exaggerations and lies behind the Wisconsin senator’s anti-Communist crusade. His work on what was known as “the Red beat” wasn’t flashy, but it prompted the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. The Senate censured McCarthy that same year. 

1969: Seymour Hersh was first to expose the 1968 My Lai Massacre and its cover-up in a story distributed by the Dispatch News Service . Although more than 300 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US troops, Lieutenant William Calley Jr. was the only soldier convicted. Hersh, who won a Pulitzer, continued to keep My Lai in public view, writing a two-part follow-up for the   New Yorker in 1972.  

1969: An investigation by Montgomery Advertiser reporter Harold Martin revealed that pharmaceutical companies were conducting drug tests on Alabama prisoners and using them as sources of blood plasma. The series sparked an inquiry by the Alabama Medical Association and led to a shakeup at the Department of Corrections. Martin won the 1970 Pulitzer for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting. 

1971: Neil Sheehan of the New York Times delivered a scoop on the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret report detailing the US government’s military and political involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The federal government sued the Times for disclosure of classified documents; the Washington Post jumped into the fray, and eventually the papers won a Supreme Court decision allowing them to continue publishing the documents. 

1972: Over 18 months, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein linked a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters to President Nixon’s reelection committee and unraveled the White House’s cover-up. Two months before Nixon resigned in 1974—and one year after they won the Pulitzer—the duo released All the President’s Men , which offered detailed accounts of Woodward’s secret meetings with Deep Throat. 

1976: Amassing 130 bylines over eight years, Gene Miller of the Miami Herald bird-dogged the story of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who had been wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1963. After Miller sent the galleys of his book, Invitation to a Lynching , to the governor in 1975, Pitts and Lee were freed. They were awarded $500,000 from the State of Florida and Miller picked up his second Pulitzer.  

1981: A Newsweek team interviewed 47 survivors from Charlie Company, a combat unit that served a yearlong tour in the jungles north of Saigon, for “What Vietnam Did to Us,” a revealing 15,000 word narrative that explored the psychology and politics of war and introduced “post-traumatic stress disorder” into the American lexicon. 

1988: The Anchorage Daily News published a 10-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning series on high rates of suicide and alcoholism among Eskimos in the Anchorage area. Reporter Kathleen McCoy—one of 70 people who worked on the package—said it was sparked by a rash of obituaries for native Alaskans in their early 20s. 

1991: Eight months of reporting by the Sacramento Bee ’s Tom Knudson spawned a 15-part series, “The Sierra in Peril,” about the environmental degradation of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. The Golden State’s fifth largest paper picked up the 1992 Pulitzer for Public Service.  

1996: Seattle Times reporter Byron Acohido tirelessly covered the aerospace industry, linking a dangerous defect in the rudder controls of Boeing 737 jetliners to a string of crashes that killed hundreds of people. His dogged investigations led to changes in FAA regulations—and a 1997 Pulitzer for Beat Reporting.   

2002: The Boston Globe ’s investigative team chronicled years of sexual abuse by Boston-area Catholic priests, which led to the criminal prosecutions of five clergy and thrust the church into the national spotlight. The series garnered the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and inspired the 2015 Academy Award-winning Spotlight .  

2004: CBS became the first national news outlet to obtain the Taguba Report, which detailed the torture and abuse of prisoners at the hands of 17 US soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Three were sentenced to military prison, and the investigation sparked impassioned international debates about human rights and torture as a tool of foreign policy. 

2011: Twenty-four-year-old Patriot-News reporter Sarah Ganim broke the story that a grand jury was investigating child sexual abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky, Penn State’s longtime assistant football coach. Sandusky was convicted and sentenced to up to 60 years in prison. Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno was dismissed, Penn State president Graham Spanier resigned, and Ganim became the third-youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

2016: In a two-part opioid exposé, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail detailed how major drug companies flooded depressed West Virginia counties via pharmacies and pill mills with more than 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, leading to 1,728 fatal overdoses over a six-year stretch. For his work, Eyre won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.  

2018: The Facebook Dilemma , a two-part Frontline investigation, chronicled the social network’s rise and its inability to safeguard millions of users’ data. The documentary won a Peabody Award and raised questions about “fake news” and whether social media is more harmful than helpful. 

2018: A South Florida Sun Sentinel series, “Unprepared and Overwhelmed,” chronicled the “series of blunders, bad policies, sketchy training, and poor leadership” that led to the rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018. The paper offered a minute-by-minute account of the shooting, which left 17 people dead, most of them students. 

Pitch a Story

Please complete the form below to pitch a story for the print or digital versions of American magazine. If we decide to pursue your story, we will contact you for additional information.

Loading....

Add a Class Note

Please complete the form below to submit a class note for the print and digital versions of American magazine. We will contact you if we need any additional information.

Student Answer Keys


Click the links below to view the Student Answer Keys in Microsoft Word format.
























To learn more about the book this website supports, please visit its .
Copyright
Any use is subject to the and |
You must be a registered user to view the in this website.

If you already have a username and password, enter it below. If your textbook came with a card and this is your first visit to this site, you can to register.
Username:
Password:
'); document.write(''); } // -->
( )
.'); } else{ document.write('This form changes settings for this website only.'); } //-->
Send mail as:
'); } else { document.write(' '); } } else { document.write(' '); } // -->
'); } else { document.write(' '); } } else { document.write(' '); } document.write('
TA email: '); } else { document.write(' '); } } else { document.write(' '); } // -->
Other email: '); } else { document.write(' '); } } else { document.write(' '); } // -->
"Floating" navigation? '); } else if (floatNav == 2) { document.write(' '); } else { document.write(' '); } // -->
Drawer speed: '; theseOptions += (glideSpeed == 1) ? ' ' : ' ' ; theseOptions += (glideSpeed == 2) ? ' ' : ' ' ; theseOptions += (glideSpeed == 3) ? ' ' : ' ' ; theseOptions += (glideSpeed == 4) ? ' ' : ' ' ; theseOptions += (glideSpeed == 5) ? ' ' : ' ' ; theseOptions += (glideSpeed == 6) ? ' ' : ' ' ; document.write(theseOptions); // -->
1. (optional) Enter a note here:

2. (optional) Select some text on the page (or do this before you open the "Notes" drawer).
3.Highlighter Color:
4.
Search for:
Search in:
Course-wide Content







Instructor Resources






Course-wide Content







COMMENTS

  1. Muckracking-Modern day

    MODERN-DAY MUCKRAKER ASSIGNMENT! ##### MUCKRAKERS: The term muckraker is most associated with a group of American investigative reporters, ... Forests can also house rare animal and plant species and can play a key role in providing water and preventing flooding and erosion. Sydney Rye, a leader in anti- deforestation policies, stated, "A ...

  2. [Solved] U.S. History II @ ACCESS Virtual Learning 2022 H Name

    For this assignment, assume the role of a modern-day muckraker and reflect on a societal ill that you believe needs exposure. Examples of societal ills are endless; it could be a local issue in your city or school or a much broader issue such as pollution, education reform, or gun control.

  3. Answer Key Chapter 21

    1. B. 3. The muckrakers played a pivotal role in initiating the Progressive Era, because they spurred everyday Americans to action. Unlike earlier sensationalist journalists, the muckrakers told their stories with the explicit goal of galvanizing their readers and encouraging them to take steps to address the issues.

  4. Muckrakers

    Bell Ringer Assignment. How did the term 'muckraker' originate? Explain Ms. Goodwin's reasoning on modern day muckrakers and how they compare to muckrakers in the past. Additional Resources ...

  5. PDF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: THE MUCKRAKERS ANSWER KEY

    Naturally, they put their talents to work, most often using fiction based on fact, but sometimes writing straight documentaries. The term "muckrakers" was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 in reference to their ability to uncover "muck," or "dirt.". Muckraker. Problem in Society. Method used to expose the problem.

  6. Module 5 Discussion: Muckraking

    Module 5 Discussion: Muckraking. From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States experienced significant growth and change. Wrapped up in these changes produced by industrialization and immigration, there were new political, social, and economic challeges, including poor living and working conditions ...

  7. Modern Day Muckrakers by Mr Wise Guy

    This assignment is a great way to connect a lesson on Progressive Era muckrakers to modern day. After learning about the role muckrakers played in changing the society they lived in, students are asked to research a modern day investigative journalist. ...

  8. US History A Unit 3B Activity -.docx (pdf)

    US History A Unit 3B Activity Total Points: 100 Modern Day Muckraker Project Part A Task Points: 30 Includes an exceptional and thorough explanation of answering the questions Shows a complete understanding of the muckrakers Provides a logical, thorough analysis Has few, if any, grammatical or spelling errors 8-9 Distinguished Includes a clear explanation of answering the questions Shows a ...

  9. Modern-day Muckrakers

    Modern-day Muckrakers. By. Andrew Erickson. When Waynesville, Missouri's Daily Guide folded in 2018, it took a piece of the city's soul with it. In a flash, there were no more theater reviews, no community events coverage, no high school football recaps. Waynesville, a town of 4,800 in the heart of the Ozarks, is now down to just one set of ...

  10. Answer Key

    Click the links below to download the Answer Key files in Microsoft Word format. Chapter 01. Chapter 02. Chapter 03. Chapter 04. Chapter 05. Chapter 06. Chapter 07. Chapter 08.

  11. Student Answer Keys

    Answer Key - Chapter 25 (31.0K) Answer Key - Chapter 26 (36.0K) To learn more about the book this website supports, please visit its Information Center .

  12. Muckraking Project by History and Psychology Resources

    Muckraker Research Project This is a partner research activity where students become modern day "muckraker" journalists like those of the late 1800s/ early 1900s. The student mission is to investigate a problem that currently exists and is causing damage or harm to some sector of modern-day societ...

  13. PDF Name: (ANSWER KEY) Hour: Jacob Riis How the Other Half Lives

    Answer Key . Name: ___ (ANSWER KEY) ___ Hour: _____ Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives Introduction The rapid growth of industrialization in the United States of the 1880s created an intense need for labor. The flood of tens of thousands of people— of them immigrants— northeastern cities created a housing problem of major proportions.

  14. MODERN DAY MUCKRAKER ASSIGNMENT! by Lana Abboud

    MODERN DAY MUCKRAKER ASSIGNMENT! MAJOR WORLD ISSUES poverty and homelessness Extreme poverty is the strongest predictor of homelessness for families. These families are often forced to choose between housing and other necessities for their survival. At least 11% of American How

  15. Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

    MODERN DAY MUCKRAKER ASSIGNMENT! MUCKRAKERS: The term muckraker is most associated with a group of American investigative reporters, novelists and critics from the late 1800s to early 1900s, who investigated and exposed societal issues caused by the 2nd Industrial Revolution. Although the term muckraking might appear to have a negative meaning ...

  16. 21st Century Muckraking: Investigative Reporting Unleashed

    During the first decade of the 21st century, a transformation in journalism began in Europe and spread to other continents. A movement in the use of data for investigations has helped lead to a resurgence of investigative reporting and has spurred the creation of small online newsrooms, as well as non-profit journalism. As ever, the conundrum of paying for it remains.