to search out and publicly expose real or apparent misconduct of prominent individuals
muckraker noun
muckraking noun
obsolete muckrake a rake for dung. The term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to describe journalists who exposed corruption. He compared them to the ‘man with the muckrake’ in Part II of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1684) who ‘could look no way but downwards’