13. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt warned the press against printing falsehoods
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt both attacked and praised a group of journalists who had emerged in the Progressive Era. These journalists and writers focused on the perceived ills of American society perpetrated by unregulated big businesses and their political cronies, the political machines of the day, and the corruption of the anti-labor movement. The President coined a term for them. He likened them to the muckraker in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Roosevelt described them as roiling the muck on the bottom of an otherwise placid pond. While he acknowledged that many of the ills described by the muckrakers did in fact exist, as did many others, Roosevelt had a warning for those practicing the new journalistic trend. He agreed corrupt practices and abuses should be attacked, but with limits on the attacker.
“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 he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful”. Roosevelt thus tasked the muckrakers with following a standard of integrity ignored by the yellow journalists, often employed by the same publisher. Muckraking stories led to changes of public opinion and the development of regulations concerning pure food, control of patent medicines, safer working conditions, increased wages and reduced working hours, and other areas. All were opposed by big business, but enough of the general public believed what they read in the papers to induce their government to act on their behalf. Muckrakers represented what the Founders intended when they insisted upon a free and uncensored press.