Buckraker: Someone who uses fame or personal connections to earn a significant amount of money outside his or her regular job. A blend of buck (slang for dollar) and muckraker (popularized in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt).
From "The Great Tea Party Rip-Off," Frank Rich's column in the Jan. 17 Week in Review section of the New York Times:
[Republican Party Chairman Michael] Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own.
Word Wizard contributor Ken Greenwald traces the first appearance of buckraker to a January 27, 1986, article by Jacob Weisberg in The New Republic; the full article isn't online, but Greenwald quotes the headline and the relevant passage:
“The buckrakers: Washington journalism enters a new era,’. . . mark February 1985 as the start of the next era. That was when Patrick J. Buchanan went to work at the White House and his financial disclosure statement revealed, to widespread astonishment and envy, that he had made $400,000 as a journalist in 1984. This included $60,000 for his syndicated column, $25,000 for his weekly appearance on ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ $94,000 for Cable News Network's ‘Crossfire,’ $ 81,000 for a radio show, and more than $135,000 for 37 speeches. Welcome to the era of the buckraker.”
Greenwald speculates that Weisberg coined buckraker for the article.
Greenwald comments:
Note: Muckraking involves searching for and exposing misconduct, corruption, scandal, etc. in public life. But it’s the two-piece form of the word muckraking that is important here, not its meaning. So that BUCKRAKING refers to ‘raking in the bucks’ whereas ‘muckraking’ refers to ‘raking in the muck’ (originally in the literal sense and later figuratively).
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