Muckrakers
Muckrakers during the Gilded Age were people who dug up the dirtiest stories possible. One of the biggest muckrakers known was Upton Sinclair. He wrote a book called "The Jungle" which talked about the meat industry. In this book, Sinclair talked about how gross and un sanitized the meat industry was. More and more people read this book and realized how bad the meat industry was. They realized that the meat they were eating probably wasn't so healthy to be eating. Because of Upton Sinclair exposing the nasty stuff that happened in the meat industry, things were changed. That's why nowadays meat has to be inspected and cleaned to be put into a store. If Sinclair wouldn't have wrote "The Jungle" we still could be eating unhealthy meat in today's world. Some other muckrakers were Ida Tarbell and Jacob Riis. Tarbell wrote about the Steel Industry and how John Rockefeller was a money-grabbing man who was viciously effective on the monopolizing of the oil trade. Jacob Riis was a journalist and his most known work is "How the Other Half Lives". This talked about the harsh life of living in the city and it caught public attention. People then started to realize how bad poverty was getting.