Upton Sinclair on the Media's "Giving the People What They Want"

It remains a commonplace that business generally and the media particularly "just give the people what they want"--the proposition that in a market society "the consumer is king" excusing business for any regrettable thing it does (they got's to make a living), by laying the entire responsibility for everything wrong with what business does at the feet of the Great Unwashed. A rather simple-minded view, it comes especially easily to those in awe of the elite, fearful of challenging power, and disdainful of the general public and its working people--which is to say, pretty much everyone allowed access to the political mainstream.

Quite naturally criticism of the view is not at all new, but it is worth remembering that in his now century-old Money Writes! Upton Sinclair specifically took on that view, and indeed gave his fifth chapter over to debunking the nonsense, explicitly remarking the utterance of "that formula every ten minutes in the offices of every yellow journal and tabloid in America . . . every popular magazine . . . every producer of theatrical and cinema excrement" as an excuse, and declaring the formula "twenty-five years out of date" in a world where advertising was a major industry, with "several thousand schools, colleges and universities of commerce in the United States" training that industry's personnel in wanting what the businessmen want them to want, extending to overcoming the "sales resistance" their actions inevitably produce in service of that consumer culture that had already emerged full bloom in America in the 1920s and in the process "destroyed the line which used to be drawn between necessities and luxuries." Indeed, the idea that business is just "giving the public what it wants" seemed to him already "ancient history" in his time, such that "the younger generation of writers never heard of it, and will refuse to believe that it ever happened."

Still, Sinclair also points out that the lie worked with the public, as when he discussed the theme of his next chapter, the end of the "muckraking" era. To use that stupid and distasteful term, what had happened was that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, for all the news media's considerable failings, exposes of society's evils had some prominence within its content ("hundreds of exposures . . . hundreds of thousands of single facts stated" that were never "disproved in a court of law"), but after the war and its associated reaction the space for such work shrank. The official line went that "the public . . . had become disgusted with the excesses of the muckrakers" and the public believed it, in spite of its having been false--false not only in the sense of the "excesses" having been those of the ones "who made the muck, not . . . those who raked it," but told that its "disgust" was what brought the reportage to an end when really it was the shrinking tolerance of a revolution-haunted elite for any challenge to "things as they are."

Meanwhile, if the younger generation of writers of his day never believed the "what the public wants" piffle they were certainly more sophisticated than the writers of our own day, who seem to swallow the foolishness whole. But then a lot was lost in that post-war period Sinclair lamented, and apparently never properly recovered down to our time a century later.