How Did Muckrakers Impact Society

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How did the muckrakers impact business and politics during the progressive era? Muckrakers were journalists whose goals were to expose corruption within businesses and to expose political leaders. There were significant muckrakers this time who gained fame for exposing corruption within our capitalist society and exposing the truth about how the government was running the United States of America. Muckrakers were also seen to be very outspoken and were often accused of disrupting the peace within society because exposing truths was a form of rebellion. Although there are different perspectives on how the muckrakers impacted society, it cannot be denied that they influenced how different ideas were seen and evaluated because exposing the truths …show more content…
Also, muckrakers did not offer many solutions for all the issues they were able to describe in such precise detail. The writers were usually “optimists who believed that their society needed reform, but not sweeping institutional change, and that merely exposing wrongdoing to the public would lead to improvement.” (Chalmers 47) This signifies that while the muckrakers did raise awareness to many of these corrupt issues, they were usually unable to offer a way to fix them because often times they were powerless against the greater powers within the government because these political leaders had power. Roosevelt was angry at the muckraker movement because the muckrakers were exposing the poor sanitation in meat making business which was obviously nit a positive for business. “The government doesn't care about the people; they care about business.” (Swados 34) Roosevelt didn't really like the muckrakers because they always got the public’s attention for all the negative things that were occurring around them but they never attempted to demonstrate how anything that was being done at this time had a positive effect on the American

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