The term muckraker is closely associated with reform-oriented journalists who wrote largely for popular magazines, continued a tradition of investigative journalism reporting, and emerged in the United States after 1900 and continued to be influential until World War I, when through a combination of advertising boycotts, dirty tricks and patriotism, the movement, associated with the Progressive Era in the United States, came to an end.

Before World War I, the term "muckraker" was used to refer in a general sense to a writer who investigates and publishes truthful reports to perform an auditing or watchdog function. In contemporary use, the term describes either a journalist who writes in the adversarial or alternative tradition or a non-journalist whose purpose in publication is to advocate reform and change.^{[citation needed]} Investigative journalists view the muckrakers as early influences and a continuation of watchdog journalism.^{[citation needed]}

The term is a reference to a character in John Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, "the Man with the Muck-rake" that rejected salvation to focus on filth. It became popular after President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the character in a 1906 speech.

George Seldes (/ˈsɛldəs/ SEL-dəs; November 16, 1890 in Alliance Colony, New Jersey – July 2, 1995 in Windsor, Vermont) was an American investigative journalist and media critic. The writer and critic Gilbert Seldes was his younger brother. Actress Marian Seldes is his niece.

Influenced by Lincoln Steffens, his career began when he was nineteen years old and was hired at the Pittsburgh Leader. In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post.

In 1916, he went to the United Press in London and, starting in 1917, during World War I, he moved to France to work at the Marshall Syndicate. While there, he interviewed Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army. Hindenburg commented on the defeat of Germany in the war, including U.S. involvement; however this interview was censored by the U. S. military. Seldes would later comment that the publishing of this interview could have avoided the rising of the Nazis to power and, thus, World War II.

After World War I, he spent ten years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1922, he interviewed Vladimir Lenin and, in 1923, got expelled from the Soviet Union, along with three colleagues, for disguising news reports as personal letters; a letter his publisher wrote for the Soviets only facilitated his expulsion. The newspaper then sent him to Italy, where he reported on opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti's murder, implicated Benito Mussolini in Matteotti's death, and was again expelled.

Cate Marvin is an American poet.

She graduated from Marlboro College, University of Houston, University of Iowa, and University of Cincinnati with a Ph.D. She teaches at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and in spring 2010 will be teaching at Columbia University.

Her work has appeared in Ploughshares,Fence, The New England Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Cincinnati Review, Slate, Verse, Boston Review, Ninth Letter, and TriQuarterly.