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A comment on Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction. Parent comment

Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by taejo on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:40PM (#11878240)
Your comment exposed me to the big gap between the meanings of muckraker in US and UK English:

1. (US) One who investigates and exposes issues of corruption that often violate widely held values; e.g. one who exposes political corruption or the poor conditions in prisons.

2. (Britain) A sensationalist, scandal-mongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.

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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by idlewords on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:44PM (#11878285)
The term was coined as a perjorative (by Teddy Roosevelt) and then co-opted as a term of honor by the journalists he was attacking.
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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by davidmr on Friday June 10, 2016 @03:35PM (#11879324)
At least in my schooling, Upton Sinclair was held up as the very model of a muckraker, and he was certainly anything but (2) above. Perhaps sensationalist on occasion, but strongly principled.
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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by idlewords on Friday June 10, 2016 @05:15PM (#11880074)
Roosevelt was applying the term to journalists at publications like McClure's. There's a great book about this period by Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit) that I can't recommend highly enough.
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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by hoorayimhelping on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:54PM (#11878387)
I'm American and I've only heard a muckraker described as number 2.
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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by smt88 on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:57PM (#11878425)
ProPublica, one of my favorite investigative news sources, describes some of their articles as "muckreads". They use the word proudly, with the implication that they've gone to lengths that the general public would/could not to find out important information.

As someone said, it was a pejorative term that was reclaimed, and that makes a lot of sense to me now.

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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by johnpowell on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:00PM (#11880448)
Talking Points Memo does the same.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker

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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by omonra on Friday June 10, 2016 @03:31PM (#11879286)
It was part of the American History 11th grade course I took in HS in the early 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

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Re:Gawker Files for Bankruptcy, Will Be Put Up for Auction by smt88 on Friday June 10, 2016 @01:41PM (#11878261)
Interesting! I'm going to change my language from "muckraking" to "investigative journalism". Thanks for pointing this out.
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