muckrake

Profit: Teddy Roosevelt named muckrakers after "The Man with the Muckrake" in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, who was supposedly always in search of filth.

The name was pejorative when used by President Theodore Roosevelt in his speech of April 14, 1906; he borrowed a passage from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , which referred to the man with the muckrake who "could look no way but downwards." But "muckraker" also came to take on favorable connotations of social concern and courageous exposure of injustice.