Book Review: The Brass Check: A Study of Journalism, by Upton Sinclair

The imagery and word-play in the titles of most of the books in Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" series tend to be easy enough for the reader to grasp, even after a century. When he titles his book on American higher education The Goose-Step, few in the audience for which he intended the book are likely to be thrown. The same goes for the title of his book on The Profits of Religion, or the neologism that is Mammonart. However, looking at the title of The Brass Check one might reasonably wonder just what a "brass check" is.

Sinclair spells that out for us early on with an anecdote from his youth in which he describes first learning of the existence of prostitution from a campaign speech by a candidate running for district attorney promising to crack down on it. As Sinclair explains, in his description of the system said candidate "pictured" to his audience a room in a brothel "in which women displayed their persons," and the customer "walked up and down and inspected" the women, "selecting one as they would select an animal at a fair," then paid his money "to a cashier at the window, and received a brass check," which he gave "to the woman upon receipt of her favors." Said candidate for office underscored his point by dramatically producing a piece of metal he claimed to be an example of such a brass check before the eyes of his audience. ("'Behold!' he cried. 'The price of a woman’s shame!'")

Affected by the performance in exactly the way the candidate intended, Sinclair thought "this BRASS CHECK was the symbol of the most monstrous wickedness in the world." However, not least from the fact of how this candidate got elected and (predictably) did absolutely nothing about the social evil he had so thunderously condemned, the young Sinclair "learned the grim lesson that there is . . . more than one kind of prostitution which may be symbolized by the BRASS CHECK."

Of course, Sinclair was not the first to call journalists prostitutes, and certainly not the last, but in combination with that anecdote his titling his book "The Brass Check" makes very clear what he thinks of the mainstream of journalism. In his view its practitioners are not merely selling labor, but honor and "self," with this underlined by reporters' sharing with prostitutes a reputation for cynicism. At the same time, for all the damage journalists do to the health and morality of individuals and society as a whole, journalists are themselves victims of an exploitative and degrading system driven by money, and above all, the determination of those who have the most money to defend their position of privilege and go on getting richer, with all this absolutely inseparable from the extreme corruption of officialdom.

As one may expect of any book of this kind written by Sinclair, he is not merely flinging insult, but making a long, carefully thought-out, case, with a good basis of comparison the analysis Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky offered in 1988's Manufacturing Consent (a book which has been a touchstone for media critics for over a generation, as Matt Taibbi's well-received Hate, Inc. reminds us). Describing a "propaganda model" of journalism, they analyze the press as, by default, promulgating elite views as a result of five factors, namely the economics making media an increasingly concentrated big business enterprise (as a matter of sheer cost and market dynamics), its associated dependence on advertising revenue (simply to cover its own expenses), reliance on "sourcing" (the need to minimize cost driving media outlets to uncritically pass on what the institutions on which they report say about themselves because it is cost-effective), susceptibility to "flak" (attacks by the offended dissuading them from particular coverage), and the "national religion" status of Anti-Communism in the United States (providing an ideological framework for their "reportage").

Sinclair, writing of what he called "[t]he methods by which the 'Empire of Business' maintains its control over Journalism," lists four factors: "ownership of the papers . . . ownership of the owners . . . advertising subsidies . . . and . . . direct bribery." In elaborating these claims over several chapters Sinclair conveyed to the reader the economics that made of news outlets big businesses often owned by other big businesses as it became concentrated in ever fewer hands, living and dying by advertising, reliant on sourcing, ever-anxious about the possibility of the counter-attack to which they are vulnerable, and deferential to the creed of Anti-Communism. Thus did he present to them the reality of the "newspaper trusts," and the empire of William Randolph Hearst, and control of the news media by the locally dominant business in many a city, state, region, if not through outright ownership (as Big Copper dominated the news business in Montana), then through their advertising dollars (department stores looming very large here). He explained the way newspapers, especially in the small town and rural areas, depended on others to supply them with content, the workings of the Associated Press syndicate on which all papers were reliant, the way business supplied papers with "propaganda" that they published as "reading matter." So, too, did he explain the ways and means by which the powerful hit back at those who "got out of line," with the condemnation of flak actually the least of the pressure brought to bear on a news outlet whose management dared to take a stand distasteful to the privileged, apt as the recalcitrant is to find itself being sabotaged in manifold ways (like the credit by which every enterprise lives being cut as bills suddenly come due). And of course, in examining the bias of the news media Sinclair showed that the bias that loomed largest by far was its extreme hostility toward labor and the left in line with its fealty to capital and the order of things it found congenial.

One may thus credit Sinclair with providing a fair prototype of the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model almost seven decades before Herman and Chomsky came out with their book, all as, in contrast with those authors who in setting forth that model deliberately played it safe, minimalistically limiting themselves to working on the basis of its most unquestionable aspects, Sinclair ranged through much territory whose very existence they did not even raise. Where Herman and Chomsky ultimately present the media as doing what it does simply because in the grip of the prevailing market and political forces it can scarcely be expected to do otherwise as they carefully avoided saying anything that would lay them open to charges of being "conspiracy theorists" or otherwise stepping beyond the limits of "legitimate" discourse in a way bespeaking the limits of the national conversation in their day (and ours), Sinclair shows the media and its owners as not unwitting but knowing and generally eager propagators of such propaganda, with class prejudice and loyalty and peer pressure playing a large part in the "ownership of the owners"; as more blatantly corrupt in the ways he referred to as "bribery" of news outlets and their personnel (as with purchases of copies, promises of lucrative jobs, outright cash payment for services rendered); and beyond being used as a result of their sourcing themselves ready to select, distort, insinuate and even make things up whole cloth to fit a narrative its owners generally desire that their outlets spread.

Moreover, while Sinclair was famously ardent and meticulous in his research (indeed, it may be this that George Orwell, who owed Sinclair more than is commonly acknowledged, appreciated most about him)--a propensity that is on full display here as he backs up his claims with a mountain of specific evidence--Sinclair writes with far, far more fury and flair than any public intellectual desirous of preserving a minimum of mainstream credibility does in our time. It may matter in this that the author is a first-rank novelist as well as a social activist, but it also matters that his was an age in which one could hope to be taken seriously when writing about an important subject of the day without putting on a great show of writing in the dry-as-dust style of a lab report (and a leftist feel the more pressure to do so for awareness of the double standard to which they are subject because of their political position, and the readiness of those hostile to them to sneeringly dismiss anything they say as a "rant" or something like it).

It matters, too, that the media treated Sinclair himself so brutally, and that even when he was not the object of their abuse as a fighter for his causes he was so often in a position to see its mistreatment of others, such that he is able to speak from very considerable personal experience and observation. Indeed, in a book substantially consisting of his showing us case after case in which the press lived down to the absolute worst that may be expected of what he says of it given its agenda and manner of functioning, almost the whole first half of The Brass Check consists of his recounting of press malfeasances he suffered personally, or at least witnessed himself. Thus does Sinclair, author of the classic novel The Jungle (1906), tell us of how the press treated his book and him at the time of its release, how it fought scurrilously against the exposé of the horrific social and industrial conditions he described in that work, how it fought against him and others as they struggled to give the country consumer protections of historic significance. He tells us, as a personal witness, of how the media conducted itself during the Colorado coal strike (the occasion of the Ludlow Massacre). He tells us, too, of how as a prominent leftist the media (not least that then-notoriously right-wing paper of his hometown, the Los Angeles Times) made Sinclair himself a target, never missing a chance to scandalize him, with its coverage of events in his life from the personal trauma of his divorce, to his once challenging a ten cent charge on a restaurant bill (!). However, the same fury carries over to his treatment of those events where his involvement was less central or even personal, from the press' attacks on his friend and colleague Jack London for his own politics, to the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike in West Virginia, and of course, the world war and subsequent events in Russia.

In all this we see, again and again, how the news media alternates between being a "concrete wall" and a "channel," completely ignoring and thus burying stories it prefers not to have reported, and in other cases screaming at the top of its lungs ad nauseam about them so that they are all anyone can think about, in line with whichever course will serve its causes--not reporting on things as much a weapon in its arsenal for manipulating the public as "telling only one side." We see, too, how that media plays fast and loose with the facts when they do scream for the sake of their narrative. Thus do they put up headlines that may have little to do with the content of the articles underneath them--because they know the headline is what most will see and remember. Thus do they accuse on their front pages on the flimsiest evidence, and often none at all, when this suits its editors and those to whom they answer--and then on those all too rare occasions when those they attacked were able to fight back, print a very small retraction at the bottom of the back page to insure that as little as possible of the damage they did was ever undone. Thus do they insinuate when even they dare not accuse, endlessly playing those word games that go so far with the credulous semi-literate.

Amid it all they ran true to pattern again and again in the specifics Sinclair recounts. Thus did they prefer to ignore the doings of organized labor, and what was done to it--unless the story would put organized labor in a negative light (as they did in their disgraceful coverage of the Colorado and West Virginia and other strikes on which Sinclair reports). Thus did they make strategic use of the sex scandal to crush those they deem enemies to be destroyed (while studiously not reporting the indiscretions of those their masters deem worthy of protection). And often they mixed up their anti-leftist bias with sex scandal in the shabbiest of ways--as when they strove to equate socialism in the minds of the susceptible with what was then called "free love" (exploiting a culture war over issues of personal morality to attack the left) and told lies about the Bolshevik government "nationalizing" the women of the country (lies that, I think, even the most stalwart of Anti-Communists today would generally prefer to forget as an embarrassment of the kind all too useful to "Anti-Anti-Communists" of all ideological backgrounds).

Of course, when we read Sinclair's book we can scarcely forget that a century has passed since his day, and much has changed, with the news media today as thoroughly dominated by the audiovisual and indeed the digital as it had been dominated by print in his time, and the movement from a local to a corporatized national media far, far more advanced, with hugely important and in many cases novel implications. However, as Sinclair's explaining so much that the media's critics have rediscovered again and again over the years shows, the fundamental drivers of the news media's conduct, and the news media's practice in ways extending beyond broad theory to sometimes quite specific tactics, has not changed, as we see when it writes now of the struggles of labor and the left, of social conditions and of social protest; of foreign affairs in peace and war and the governments of other nations of whom the powerful disapprove; as it exploits sex scandal and culture war in the same ways that drove Sinclair to write this book and pay for its publication on terms that made his act a public service rather than the pursuit of a payday. The result is that read today The Brass Check not only makes for a fascinating history lesson, but like many another century-old book (not least, the other Dead Hand books in Sinclair's Dead Hand series), teaches us more about the present than the vast majority of books written today purporting to tell us about the era in which we live.