Muckraker No More: Just Plain Muck-Maker

Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most prominent philosophers of the nineteenth century whose influence upon existentialism was immense, once quoted: “A casual stroll down the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” A world of great ideas thrives in this terse yet eloquent sentence. Yet, the most dominant concept in this statement would be that something is proven correct and truthful only with appropriate facts or evidences. Without the facts to bolster a statement, the statement transmutes into a meaningless insistence. The world of journalism took this idea into their very core of conducts and constructed a tenet of reporting truth based on careful probing. The journalists whose investigations took a further step than their colleagues’ are collectively known as the “muckrakers,” as the U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt referred to them for the first time. While it is not to deny the deeds of the early muckrakers who toiled to improve the standards of life, their comparatively-modern counterparts are increasingly reliant upon sensationalism and assume an apparent – or even unapparent and faulty – situation as a firm truth. Such are shown in the real-life examples of lack of media responsibility in the Johnson & Johnson’s “poisoned Tylenol” case of 1979 and the Samyang case of 1989.

   The Johnson & Johnson’s case of “poisoned Tylenol” case of 1979, which caused a huge deficit for the company in the short term, is an epitome of how the muckrakers were irresponsible and unreasonable in the distribution of information. In the early 1979, there were eight reports of deaths from taking Tylenol, a common medication to relieve headaches, migraines, and other forms of pains. The modern muckrakers of the time, eager to search for the cause of the death, delineated a conclusion of their own after having investigated that the Tylenol pills that the deceased took were poisoned to an extreme amount. The company manufacturing Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, was soon accused of mistreating one of its most prominent products and was sued shortly afterwards. However, this was not all; the muckrakers further pressured the company for direct and quick action, and this sentiment was spread all over the world, damaging even further of the image that had already been crippled. As a result, Johnson & Johnson decided to recall all of their Tylenol products, and this resulted in a monstrous deficit of 240 million dollars. At the court case, however, the company was not found to be guilty, and was free of all charges. The journalists who wrote demeaning articles were condemned indeed, but they were not accused of the profit loss of this unlucky corporation. If one is to analyze this situation, it would reveal that the so-called muckrakers were persuading the public with what seems to be the apparent in order to grab people’s attentions. However, when their journals were found to be inaccurate, they only received minute blame.

The Samyang case of 1989, which ultimately damaged the company’s reputation to a degree to which it lost the status of being one of the most prominent businesses in the industry, is another prime example of excessive muckraking. Whereas Johnson & Johnson was lucky enough to regain their safe, clean and moral image after the incident, the case was not for Samyang, as the company is, to this day, associated with market trickery and manipulating the consumers. In the winter of 1989, the company was charged with using industrial oil for frying ramen noodles. The story behind this case is as follows. Samyang Corporation in the 1980s could be divided largely into two groups: one was Samyang Food Corporation and the other was Samyang Oil & Petroleum Corporation. When the Samyang Oil & Petroleum Corporation was travelling through a profit loss of its own, the muckrakers found out that the company was experiencing the stockpile of unsold products, including industrial oil. The muckrakers, trying to combine the decreased sale of Samyang’s ramen and the overproduction of industrial oil, devised a theory about Samyang using inappropriate materials in order to create products. At the court case, the company was found to be using vegetable oil much of higher quality than the market regulations and thus was free of all charges. Yet, the journalists who castigated the company’s wrongdoings only left a note that the information was mistakenly distributed. The study of this case would reveal that the muckrakers of modern world are with little responsibility. There are some accusations that the journalists involved were bribed from the rivaling company to write such articles, and that the rivaling company had the intention to damage Samyang’s reputation upon knowing that the journalists would not be too responsible.

Both stories reveal that although the muckrakers and the press have a great amount of freedom, they lack responsibility. Responsibility is a quality that should increase with the inclination of the amount of freedom. The press seems to have gathered a great amount of liberty for themselves, through the declaration of the freedom of speech and press. However, it seems to have lost a sense of responsibility for itself, as there are little regulations to actually stop the journalists from performing their penmanship. Even the one of the most controversial of the modern muckrakers, Julian Assange, the leader of WikiLeaks, was not accused of distributing false information but of sexual offenses. As this example reveals, the modern muckrakers are often unrestrained in their performance and are aided by the extreme advancement of the modern technology. With this knowledge, the muckrakers have turned into “muck-makers,” intent upon creating sensationalistic articles in order to continue their media market dominance.

The aforementioned cases of negative muckraking as well as their analysis reveal that muckraking, unlike their positive sequences of the past, is becoming tainted with the sensationalism and thus, the muckrakers are often travelling too extreme in delivering the information. It is not to deny that the muckrakers of the past who worked to improve working conditions, better the consumer rights, and improve other sectors of human rights should not be credited with rightful honor. Yet it is to emphasize that their current counterparts are no more the equal good of the past. As Nietzsche emphasized, “The only way out of the lunatic asylum is finding the truth,” the muckrakers should retain their truthfulness.

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