I’ve been called a few choice names before, but “muckraker” was a new one. This was hurled at me after a talk I gave in which I had criticized RFK Jr.’s scientific acumen and it was clear from the tone that this was not meant as a compliment. There was no further interaction with the accuser, but his comment did trigger a curiosity about the origin of the term. So down the rabbit hole I went.

It didn’t take long to learn that the term traces back to The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s classic 1678 novel about a man’s literal journey from the City of Destruction, representing sin, toward the Celestial City where salvation is to be found through faith. Along the way he encounters angels, demons and various personae who guide him on the right path or expose him to the pitfalls of a life in the absence of a spiritual connection. An example of the latter is “The Man with the Muck-rake,” who is so absorbed in raking dirt that he ignores evidence of the divine.

President Theodore Roosevelt considered Pilgrim’s Progress “one of the best books ever written,” and in a famous 1906 speech used the term “muckraker” as a metaphor for journalists who concentrated exclusively on scandal and corruption without failing to recognize positive achievements. The term was adopted by journalists themselves with the positive connection being forgotten and investigative reporters who exposed corruption, unsafe conditions, social problems and political wrongdoing became known as “muckrakers.”

The term was quickly applied to two books, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Samuel Hopkins Adams’s The Great American Fraud, both published in 1906. In The Jungle, socialist writer Sinclair........

© Montreal Gazette