Mückrāker (n) – a term associated with a group of American investigative reporters, novelists, and critics from the late 1800s to early 1900s, who investigated and exposed societal issues such as conditions in slums and prisons, factories, mental institutions, sweatshops, mines, child labor and unsanitary conditions in food processing plants.

Muckrakers often wrote about impoverished people and took aim at the established institutions of society.  In the early 1900s, muckrakers shed light on such issues by writing books and articles for popular magazines and newspapers such as Cosmopolitan, The Independent, and McClure's.  The term muckraker now also applies to contemporary persons who follow in the tradition of that period, and now covers topics such as fraudulent claims by manufacturers of patent medicines, modern-day slavery, child prostitution, child pornography, and drug trafficking.

President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with originating the term 'muckraker.' During a speech in 1906, he likened investigative journalists to "the Man with the Muckrake", a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678):

"There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful."

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