muckraking
/ˈmʌkreɪkɪŋ
/noun [mass noun]
The action of searching out and publicizing scandal about famous people: [as modifier]: a muckraking journalist...
- Do you have any muckraking journalists over there?
- They want you to think they're just investigating muckraking fools and tracked down this bust through a series of astute analyses and fancy footwork, when probably the total extent of their exertion was picking up a phone.
- They didn't want to inflame the envy of common people; they didn't want to expose themselves to muckraking scrutiny; they didn't want to endanger the security of their families.
Derivatives
muckrake
/ verb ...- Just encourage the tabloids to gossip and muckrake while the participants are unable to answer back, clog up the pop charts with the fallout, and you have a multimedia licence to print money.
- They quake, rant, muckrake, scream like 17th-century Puritans.
- There has always been a divide in the craft between those who want to be rich or famous or maybe an editor or publisher someday and those who want to muckrake.
muckraker
/ noun ...- But we still have to watch these troublemaking scandalmakers and muckrakers and, with a sigh, ask: ‘When will we able to lead a beautiful life?’
- The real Golden Age of News in U.S. history was the epoch of the so-called muckrakers, an extraordinary bunch of independent journalistic sleuths.
- Do not read books which tell you that the world is soon coming to an end, and do not read the writing of muckrakers and pessimistic philosophers who tell you that it is going to the devil.
Origin
Coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech (1906) alluding to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the man with the muck rake.