The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism; Evidence and Reasons Behind the Media's Corruption (Hardcover). Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism; Evidence and Reasons Behind the Media's Corruption (Hardcover)

Turning his muckraking talents to journalism itself, Upton Sinclair exposes a variety of the news media's ingrained biases and its agenda-serving corruption. Upton Sinclair became famous for exposing filthy and inhumane conditions in the American meat packing industry at the turn of the 20th century. Following these revelations, new laws were made protecting factory workers and their conditions. Sinclair afterwards became a figure for condemnation - his personal life was scrutinized and subjected to spurious gossip and rumor, the cause being that the vast majority of newspaper corporations opposed his pro-worker, pro-regulation views. The title of this book alludes to a common practice in brothels: those frequenting these establishments would buy 'brass checks' to hand to the woman of their choice. Sinclair draws a parallel between such customers and the proprietors of the media, who delegate the promotion of their political, financial and social agendas to journalists willing to propagate such ideas.

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (1878 - 1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence". He is also well remembered for the line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He used this line in speeches and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of the major newspapers in California would not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and other progressive reforms. Upton Sinclair was considered a force of nature -- being not only prolific in his novel-writing but a political force of decided influence. Unknown to many of his admirers, Sinclair also wrote adventure fiction, under the name Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.