Muckraking Quotes

Corruption was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social.

Great deeds and utterances are now so diluted with printer’s ink that we can no longer find a sage or saint.

Investigative reporting is not a way to make friends.

A man that could look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hand.

When I see an idiot in high station I will add such terrors to his elevation as I can. I will put as many thorns in his crown as the leisure that I can snatch from the pressure of other pleasures will permit me to weave in; and neither the deprecation of his friends nor his own retaliatory lies shall stop the good work.

This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that.

There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially … a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.

I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.

The progress of society depends on nothing more than the exposure of time-honored abuses.

These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control.

If you're not engaged in challenging the lies of the system, what's the good of living in this society?

What would this country be like without the press prying to find out what the government is doing?

Misrepresentation of public Measures is easily overthrown, by representing public Measures truly; when they are honest, they ought to be publicly known, that they may be publicly commended, but if they are knavish or pernicious, they ought to be publicly exposed, in order to be publicly detested.

The press deserved the attacks and criticisms of Will Irwin (1910) and Upton Sinclair (1920) and the muckrakers who followed, and it needs today the watchdog and gadfly activities of the new critical weeklies, but all in all it is now a better medium of mass information.... The 1972 Watergate disclosures, it is true, were made by only a score of the members of the mass media, but I remember Teapot Dome when only one of our 1,750 dailies (the Albuquerque Morning Journal) dared to tell the truth about White House corruption. We have come a long way since.

We must not be willing to disinter the origins of those [institutions] we wish to preserve.

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.

The job of a political correspondent is the challenge the people in power. If you are in power, I will challenge you.

Theodore Roosevelt ... had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical press's increasing criticisms and investigations of business and political abuses

If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list.

A decent and manly examination of the acts of Government should be not only tolerated but encouraged.

We muckraked, not because we hated our world, but because we loved it. We were not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter.

Well, our job is to bash the President, that's what we do almost …

Muck-raker

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.

Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.