Where does the term muckraker come from?

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The name muckraker was pejorative when used by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech on April 14, 1906; he borrowed a passage from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress that referred to “the Man with the Muckrake…who could look no way but downward.” But muckraker came to take on favourable connotations of social concern and courageous exposition.