The Muckrakers - Evangelical Crusaders

This collection of essays provides a critical and scholarly assessment of muckraking journalists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributors discuss how spiritual values led journalists to seek social change, through crusades and expos^D'es, sometimes at the price of public confusion and cynicism. They explore how the richest church in America was forced to clean up its tenement houses, how a Buffalo newspaper crusaded for improvements in living conditions for immigrants, why women journalists were keys to civic improvement efforts, and how muckraking and the crusading spirit permeated the press even in small towns. The authors place these stories in the context of various facets of early 20th century American culture.

These fresh perspectives on America's first investigative reporters will appeal to media scholars, historians and to professional journalists. An epilogue appeals for a return to the values and spirit of the muckrakers that might spur the public's interest and provide a moral center and ethic of caring in American journalism.

List of contents

Introduction: Why the Muckrakers Are Still with Us by Robert Miraldi
The Muckrakers as Evangelicals by Bruce J. Evensen
Anatomy of a Crusade: The Buffalo News' Campaign for Immigrants by Michael Dillon
Muckraking the World's Richest Church by Robert Miraldi
Women and Exposé Reform and Housekeeping by Agnes Hooper Gottlieb
Lincoln Steffens: The Paradoxical Muckraker by Stephen Whitfield
Small-town Editor, Big-time Fight by James Kates
Did the Muckrakers Muck Up Progress? by Thomas Leonard
Epilogue: Muckraking and the Ethic of Caring by Howard Good

About the author

ROBERT MIRALDI is Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of Muckraking and Objectivity: Journalism's Colliding Traditions (Greenwood, 1991).

Product details

• Authors: Robert Miraldi, Miraldi Robert
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.08.2000
• EAN: 9780275969158
• ISBN: 978-0-275-96915-8
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; USA, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Journalism, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Business Ethics, 20th Century, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Media & Communications, Press & journalism, Business ethics & social responsibility, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Social and cultural history, United States of America, USA, Business ethics and social responsibility, News media and journalism, Popular Culture: Media, Television, and Radio