Blog #5: Response to Chapter 6, "Muckraking"

The Muckrakers played a huge role in our history if it weren't for them society would still be denoted by robber barons and corrupt politicians. These reporters provoked political, industrial, and social change by describing the horrid details to create a new style of magazine writing. Consequently the rise of the magazine was instrumental in the success of muckraking. Muckraking was called "The Literature of Protest." The first Muckraker was in 1902 name Lincoln Staffers, he began writing journals. He wrote articles exposing the "illegal and unscrupulous practices" among state government officials. He went through public records and interviewing city officials. Another famous Muckraker was Ida Tarbell known as the queen of the Muckrakers. In 1906, congress passed the Hepburn Act, "which made the penalties for preferential arrangements by railroads so severe that the practice quickly ceased." Muckrakers were an important part of history.

Blog #4: Chapter 4 Response, "Journalism of Vertification"

In the 1920s, Walter Lippman said that journalists should focus on "evidence and vertification." He's refering to how journalists should mainly focus on the evidence and verify it to maintain credibility. Some of his principles of reporting was to never add anything was not there, never decline the audience, be transparent as possible about your methods and motives and rely on your reporting. I agree with him because now in days many journalists write/report about random things and aren't reliable because of where they got the sources from. They don't validate their evidence. This could lead to bad journliasm for the public by misinforming them with false information. These journalists rely on misleading sources instead of creditable ones. According to Walter Lippman, "In journalism, only by explaining what we know can we approximate, the idea of people being able, if they were of mind, to replicate the reporting. This is what is meant by the objectivity of method in science and in journalism." Articles written by these journalists don't explain much on their reporting and don't elablorate much on it.