The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism

Upton Sinclair

12/2015 · Open Road Media

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A muckraking exposé of corruption in American journalism from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Jungle

Upton Sinclair dedicated his life to documenting the destructive force of unbridled capitalism. In this influential study, he takes on the effect of money and power on mass media, arguing that the newspapers, magazines, and wire services of the Progressive era formed “a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor.”
 
In the early twentieth century, a “brass check” was a token purchased by brothel patrons. By drawing a comparison between journalists and prostitutes, Sinclair highlights the total control publishers such as William Randolph Hearst exerted over their empires. Reporters and editors were paid to service the financial and political interests of their bosses, even if that meant misrepresenting the facts or outright lying. Sinclair documents specific cases, including the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 and the Red Scare whipped up by Hearst’s New York Journal and other newspapers, in which major news outlets ignored the truth in favor of tabloid sensationalism.
 
Sinclair considered The Brass Check to be his most important and most dangerous book. Nearly a century later, his impassioned call for reform is timelier than ever.
 
This ebook has been authorized by the estate of Upton Sinclair.

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Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism; and the eleven novels in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.