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Muckraking Muckraking is a period in time in the early 1900’s when investigative journalism became popular and was a form of journalism used primarily to expose issues that would not necessarily be addressed else where. One example of an issue that Muckraking exposed and investigated is issues in the meat packing industry and the way our food and drugs were processed.
In response to this, Congress was persuaded to pass reforms such as the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906) and the Meat Inspection Act (1906) due to the important findings brought up in this investigative journalism. Some documents included in this book show how this new style of journalism helped expose many numerous problems America was facing around the early 1900’s. An example of a document used is “The Shame of Minneapolis” which is an magazine article that deals with urban political corruption that was published for McClure’s Magazine in the January 1903 issue.
This document investigated how Minneapolis was full of crooked politicians and police officers who were trying to over throw the city and how one man tried to over throw the corruption. The other documents in the book include articles of problems dealing with political corruption, corruption in the Standard Oil Company, and the right for workers to be able to strike for better conditions and pay. This book helped me better understand Muckraking and investigative journalism in a more in depth way.
It was very interesting to read how these issues addressed came about and how when posted in a magazine for example it reaches a broad spectrum of people from all different backgrounds. This book seemed boring at first, but in the end I feel that it was effective in providing me a foundation for this topic, then becoming more in depth with little things that are not normally addressed in a basic summary. I do feel that the editors did succeed in their goals of compiling articles and using more interesting in depth facts on the subject matter.
The book could have been better in my opinion by being a little less wordy because I felt at times it was nice to have numerous opinions, but sometimes it was over kill because I feel as if I can form my own opinion when looking over articles and being presented with numerous facts in this subject area. One thing I did learn from reading this book is that if it were not for Muckrakers, there basically would most likely be no to little investigative journalism because the Muckraker’s in a way laid the basis for this subject area.
If it was not for their investigative reporting many numerous social issues would have never been exposed such as living conditions in slums, work conditions in sweatshops, and issues with child labor. Muckrakers at the time often wrote about mainly impoverished people and took aim at major institutions for the better good of the less fortunate. In other words, if it wasn’t for the Muckraker’s contributions to society and well being of people our society today might be drastically different in areas such as working conditions and living conditions.