As they became to be known as muckrakers these reporters, authors, and critics sought to expose the evils and injustices of Gilded Age society, hoping to expose such social ills before they strangled democracy. Most muckrakers attacked corruption in businesses and politics but others went after exposing city and living conditions along with unchecked food sold to the public. The muckrakers' influence in society reached its peak between 1904 and 1908, when the exposes on patent-medicine fraud, meat processing, insurance swindles, monopolies, political corruption, and racial violence led to criminal indictments and reform legislation. A muckraker usually focuses on the public interest. They worked to expose cases of government and corporate corruption, child labor, environmental abuse, and rising crime. Informers are often used to go on the inside of an issue being covered, and provide concrete information which will allow a journalist to go live with a story. Sometimes a muckraker would go investigate an issue their selves by getting inside a factory or building and first hand seeing the corruption and wrongdoings occur. .
Most of these problems that muckrakers exposed were formed during the gilded age. Political bosses and machines paid off big businesses to keep them in power and used processes like padding bills and submitting false receipts. Political machines worked through exchanges of favors that only a muckraker could find out. The living conditions of mainly the poor and immigrants were awful. Most of them lived in tenements which were small rooms housing several families. The city life at the time was poor, there was little sanitation and overpopulation due to factories which led to an increase in disease and pollution. Muckrakers like Jacob Riis would write books about how people lived during this time in order to get the conditions fixed and shown to government. In factories child labor was an issue because businesses used children to work on dangerous machines that needed small fingers to operate.