The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

Abstract

Sinclair, Upton. The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 446 pp. $19.95. When Upton Sinclair died in 1968, New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman called him a rebel with a multitude of causes. While The Jungle may have impressed Sinclair upon the public mind of the Progressive Era as a crusader for clean food, The Brass Check, reissued this year by the University of Illinois Press, made him the watchdog of the press. Sinclair's work also contributed a compelling metaphor to the study of mass communication: The commercial or advertising-subsidized media can either be a channel to carry the news or a concrete to stop it. Individuals or institutions with wealth and power can dictate which condition prevails; others can not. In the first half of The Brass Check, Sinclair illustrates his thesis by relating his experiences with the press wall as he tried to publicize socialist causes and his investigations of business corruption. In the book's second half, he uses his experiences and those of others to illustrate how social elites control the press by owning newspapers and magazines or by using bribes and advertising to manipulate publishers and editors. The final thirty-eight pages describe remedies. He recommends: laws to punish newsmen who deliberately publish falsehoods; an end to the Associated Press news monopoly; a reporters' union to enforce ethical behavior and to negotiate livable wages; government representation at councils where news policy is formed; and support for government, labor and reform groups that wish to publish their own newspapers. Sinclair's notion that press performance fell short of democratic and professional ideals because of dysfunctional relationships with other social institutions was not new in 1920. Beginning with the Gilded Age, others criticized what E.L. Godkin disdainfully referred to as supply-demand journalism. For the most part, however, this pre-Sinclair critique was confined to the pages of quality magazines, the trade press, and some scholarly journals. Because of his political notoriety and vigor, Sinclair brought press criticism to a wider audience, and his message has been amplified since by others wuch as George Seldes, C. Wright Mills, and Ben Bagdikian. Sinclair self-published The Brass Check, and he expected the press power structure to suppress it. Few newspapers reviewed it, but the book's subject matter was probably not the only reason. The author had a reputation among journalists as a shameless self-promoter who once passed off a fictional story as a true account to ensure its publication. …