Social Injustice Continues To Affects Society !

According to the website, answers.com the term "Muckraker” is often indispensable to the well being of the society but “. . . only when they know how to stop raking the muck and to look upward to the celestial crown above them to the crown of worthy endeavor." Apparently the term muckrakers was first used by President Teddy Roosevelt. I found that this is an important term and for that reason I am going to analyzed it. Without Muckrakers (currently called investigative reporters) the problems in society can get even worse if the people are not aware of what is happening. Having said that, I agree the job of an investigative reporter is essential because it exposes all the problems that society faces at any level, political and economic. During the Industrial Revolution the average person in the street saw a lot of injustice and they did not do anything. A lot of the people only folded their hands and did nothing when families like the” Robber Barons” got very wealthy because they controlled almost everything. For that reason the wealth of the country at that time was concentrated in only a few hands.When the first muckrakers appeared they started to speak out and they tried to expose the injustice of this wealthy group of people that I mention above controlling so much. The muckrakers were investigating everything. They looked at all the children being exploited in the factories. They saw people working impossible long hours. They saw horrible treatment of the immigrants that were arriving in the United States. The muckrakers wrote about all the injustices and they tried to convince the people that something needs to be done about it. For the most part they were very successful because the government changed some of the laws and forced the owners of manufacturing places and big companies to treat their employees fairly and humanly. Obviously all of this did not come easy. A lot of the wealthy were mad because they believed that the muckrakers were causing chaos in society. Yes, is true the muckrakers were causing trouble. However, they were working in favor of the poor families that were suffering tremendously because they did not have the quality of life that the wealthy had.
For that and many other reasons I agree with Lippmann when he says in page 62 the following:

"...It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew--all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a barbarous myth."
All of these things happened during the industrial revolution because the government was not very sophisticated and the economy was run by the few and society was changing with the new immigrants that were arriving from Europe. Many in government were corrupt also. Today we need more than never the job of an investigative reported because we still see a lot of injustice being committed by people and the government. A perfect example of this is the huge fraud that was committed by Bernard Madoff, finally fully exposed by alerted investigative reporters!