The Brass Check Totally Explained

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The Brass Check is a muckraking exposé of American journalism by Upton Sinclair published in 1919. It focuses mainly on newspapers and the Associated Press wire service, along with a few magazines. Other critiques of the press had appeared, but Sinclair reached a wider audience with his personal fame and lively,provocative writing style. Sinclair called The Brass Check "the most important and most dangerous book I've ever written."(p. 429)
   For much of Sinclair's career he was known as a "two book author": for writing The Jungle and The Brass Check. Sinclair organized ten printings of The Brass Check in its first decade and sold over 150,000 copies. To maximize his readership, he didn't take advantage of the opportunity to copyright the book.
   Sinclair quotes a letter from the editor of the weekly San Francisco Star, James H. Barry: ť "You wish to know my "confidential opinion as to the honesty of the Associated Press." My opinion, not confidential, is that it's the damndest, meanest monopoly on the face of the earth--the wet-nurse for all other monopolies. It lies by day, it lies by night, and it lies for the very lust of lying. Its news-gatherers, I sincerely believe, only obey orders."

Among the recent events whose media coverage he discusses are the Colorado mine workers strike in 1914, the West Virginia coal-miners’ strike of 1913, Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) meetings, and the Red Scare whipped up by the newspapers. As a tireless investigative reporter, Sinclair offered the results of his investigations to the newspapers for publication, but was almost entirely ignored.
   The propaganda tactics practiced by U.S. government and corporations during World War I were continued after the war against political dissenters. Sinclair writes, "[T]oday all the energies which were directed against the Kaiser have been turned against the radicals."

Remedies proposed

Sinclair recognized that a grass-roots response (mass meetings, demonstrations, circulating pamphlets, etc.) wasn't adequate when the mass media spread misinformation or ignored the truth. His main proposed remedies were:

a law that any newspaper which prints a false statement shall be required to give equal prominence to a correction, on penalty of a substantial fine.
the AP's monopoly, which he saw as a "public utility", should be challenged by other wire services.
a law forbidding any newspaper to fake telegraph or cable dispatches.
reporters must unionize so they've the power to fix their wage-scale and their ethical code.
an endowed weekly chronicle of news, without advertisements or editorials, cheaply printed and widely available.

Political reception

The first code of ethics for journalists was created in 1923.
   By 1923, the FBI had in its files a report on The Brass Check, and a memorandum in the file noted that the directing manager of the Associated Press "has in his possession a confidential report on the book, The Brass Check."
   Sinclair challenged those who charged him with inaccuracy to review his published facts, and to sue him for libel if they found he'd been wrong. None did. But because Sinclair was denied access to the mainstream media to refute those charges, they assumed the aura of truth, and gave the book a reputation for inaccuracy that caused it to be almost forgotten by midcentury. and "astonishingly prescient in its critique of the coziness of big media and other corporate interests."
   However, on its publication "[m]ost newspapers refused to review the book, and those very few that did were almost always unsympathetic. Many newspapers, like the New York Times, even refused to run paid advertisements for the book (p. 294)." And "those historians who bother to mention The Brass Check dismiss it as ephemeral, explaining that the problems it depicts have been solved."

Quotations

See quotes from The Brass Check at WikiQuote

Editions

Reprinted: The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism, by Upton Sinclair, with an introduction by Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2003). ISBN 0-252-02805-8 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-07110-7 (paper).

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