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Muckraking is one of those g u t t u r a l words that sounds exactly like what it means: getting down into the muck and corruption that often underlay powerful institutions; raking through, organizing and documenting the corruption in a way that is of great value to citizens if they are to govern themselves.

The original muckrakers were a collection of journalists and fiction writers who at the turn of the century wrote detailed, fascinating and very effective exposés of corporate and political power. Laws were changed. Tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller were embarassed into donating large sums of money to charitable organizations. U.S.President Theodore Roosevelt named these journalists muckrakers, not as an insult but as a compliment.

Muckrakers were later recognized as the vanguard of progressive political movements that erupted in the U.S.prior to the First World War. Their works are still considered classics.

Ida Tarbell’s series on the Standard Oil Company (precursor to Exxon) consisted of 18 monthly installments in McClure’s Magazine. Tarbell raked through a wealth of court documents and transcripts of congressional hearings into Standard’s operations. She interviewed people who worked for the monopoly as well as those who had been victimized by it.

Then she documented how Standard Oil officials had fought their way to control by “rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, and perhaps even more important by ruthless,never slothful efficiency of organization and production,”

Her muckraking produced not only a scathing indictment of Standard Oil,but of American business practice in general.In 1904,the series was published as a book (554 pages). Various editions are still available,including paperback editions that are half the length of the original book (The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell)

If this seems like ancient history consider Enron. Might there be another Ida Tarbell out there who will document Enron’s scurrilous practices? And might there be a brave publisher/editor such as S.S.McClure to encourage her.

Upton Sinclair was another muckraker. His classic novel,The Jungle, exposed the horrors of the Chicago meatpacking plants and the wage-slave immigrants who were often worked to death in them.The book was an immediate bestseller and led to new regulations that forever changed workers’rights and the meat packing industry. The Jungle is still available,in fact a paperback edition was released earlier this year (The Jungle,Modern Library, 2002)

Again, one would like to think that such horror stories are well behind us.And perhaps they are.But in southeastern Alberta,within view of the TransCanada highway,there is a mammoth rendering plant where 1.2 million cattle are slaughtered a year — 30 per cent of the Canadian total.Many of the employees are recent immigrants who don’t speak English.

The muckrakers tackled many issues — food adulteration, unscrupulous insurance practices, fraudulent claims for patent medicines,exploitation of children and links between government and vice. The more I read about them, the more I realized their issues weren’t that different from issues facing today’s journalists.

Of course we don’t call such journalists muckrakers anymore; that label is considered somewhat pejorative.We prefer to use the term investigative journalist.It sounds more professional (although a lot less fun). But whatever it’s called, it’s clear there’s a long tradition of this sort of journalism. The muckrakers were but one form.

Even though he wrote fiction, Charles Dickens was an investigative journalist, as were the writers at the Parliament Scout. It was first published in England in 1643 and “suggested something new in journalism — the necessity of making an effort to search out and discover the news.” A year later a publication called The Spie promised readers that it would be “discovering the usuall(sic) cheats in the great game of the Kingdome (sic).For that we would have to go undercover.”

Watergate turned investigative journalism into a high-minded,noble affair.For years after scores of students flooded journalism schools with hopes of becoming the next Woodward or Bernstein.But what has happened to investigative journalism in the past decade? And what are its prospects?

In The Elements of Journalism (Three Rivers Press, 2001) Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel argue that investigative journalism has developed a split personality.It’s become trendy,especially on TV,but at the same time has veered sharply away from its origins.According to Kovach and Rosenstiel:“A study of prime-time newsmagazines in 1997, reveals a genre of investigative reporting that ignores most of the matters typically associated with the watchdog role of the press.

Fewer than one in ten stories on these programs concerned the combined topics of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security,politics or social welfare — or any areas where most public money is spent.

More than half the stories focused on lifestyle, behaviour, consumerism,health or celebrity entertainment.” In many quarters things are so bad voyeurism is confused with investigative journalism.But it’s not all bad news.

There are many journalists who are still determined to follow in the footsteps of Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. We have many examples in Canada: Walter Stewart, Stevie Cameron, Linda McQuaig, Victor Malarek, Farley Mowat, Linden MacIntyre, Ken Rubin to name just a few.

And there are still some news media organizations willing to finance complex,time-consuming projects and take the heat when the results are published or broadcast. But as news and entertainment converges, “investigative journalism”is in danger of becoming nothing more than celebrities spying on celebrities for the sake of high ratings. I don’t think Ida Tarbell would have approved.

Interested in finding out more about muckraking? Try these books :

• Citizen Muckraking: Stories and Tools for Defeating the Goliaths of Our Day Center for Policy Integrity, 2000, 200 pages, $11.00

• Stories that Changed America:Muckrakers of the 20th Century Seven Stories.Press, 2000, $39.95

• More Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism By Robert C.Kochersberger,University of Tennessee Press, 1996 Trade Paperback, $30.50

• Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking By Jessica Mitford, 1988

• The Muckraker’s Manual By M. Harry, Loompanics Unlimited, 1984

• The Muckrakers edited by Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg, University of Illinois Press, 2001 496 pages, trade paperback, $19.95

• Muckraking! The Journalism That Changed America Edited by Judith Serrin and William Serrin, published by the New press in July 2002, $25 (U.S.)