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A muckraker is a journalist who digs up dirt — who investigates and publishes the ugly, hidden things that powerful people would rather keep quiet. The word carries two quite different feelings depending on who is using it, and that is the interesting part. In American history it is close to a badge of honour: the original muckrakers were reporters in the early 1900s who exposed filthy meat factories, corrupt city governments and cruel oil companies, and their work led to real laws that protected ordinary people. President Theodore Roosevelt coined the label in 1906, and he did not mean it kindly — he was comparing them to a man in an old religious story who is so busy raking through filth on the floor that he never looks up to see the beautiful things above him. But the journalists took the name and wore it proudly. Today, when someone calls a reporter a muckraker, it usually means the second thing: that the reporter is not seeking truth but poking through celebrities' private lives for gossip, or spreading nasty stories that may not even be true. You have to read the sentence around it to know which is meant.
扒糞記者、揭弊記者（也可帶貶意：專挖人隱私、寫八卦的記者）
組成muck + rake + -er. Muck is filth or animal dung, a rake is the garden tool you drag through leaves or soil, and -er makes it the person doing it. So literally: someone who rakes through the filth. The picture comes from a character in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the Man with the Muck-rake, whom President Roosevelt referred to in a 1906 speech.
同家族的字
- muckthe filth being raked
- rakethe tool, and the action of dragging it through something
- muckrakingthe name of the activity itself
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
muckrakernoun
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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.
- The paper gave a start to the theater critic Hilton Als and the novelist Colson Whitehead, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize. Its resident muckraker, Wayne Barrett, took aim at New York developers and politicians for nearly 40 years, and his obsessive work on Donald J. Trump has become a resource for reporters covering the president today.
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historicalOne of a group of American investigative reporters, novelists and critics of the Progressive Era (the 1890s to the 1920s).
- "Oh, in many ways. There are two classes of people who are not welcomed on the Canal Zone—magazine writers and applicants for positions who have political influence back of them. The former are regarded as muckrakers, the latter as spies."
- "Lady," says he, "the goil's nutty! You got a bughouse patient on your bands! This here talk about the white-slave traffic, ma'am… it's all the work o' these magazine muckrakers!"
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derogatoryA sensationalist, scandalmongering journalist, one who is not driven by any social principles.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。