Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle was in many respects the highpoint of muckracking, investigative journalism, a century ago.
Thanks to that book, we got the F.D.A. and federal Meat Inspection.
Sinclair, himself, remained a little more ambivalent about the book's success. "I aimed for the hearts of the American people," he said, "but I hit them in the stomach." Or something like that.
Although he wrote some 92 books and 29 pamphlets, he's remembered as a "two book" author.
The "other" book was the one he wrote straight from his own heart,
"The Brass Check.
It's an examination -- and indictment -- of the mainstream press in America. (A 'brass check' was a reference to the tokens used in brothels, given to patrons to give to the working... journalists.)
No publisher would take the book, so it was never copyrighted. Sinclair paid to have it printed himself, and ended up selling 150,000 copies, a pretty successful run for a book at the time.
The first nine chapters available for free download here:
http://www.teleread.org/brasscheck.htmThe actual download link is on the right side of the page. It's available in MS WORD format, MS Reader and some other format I never heard of -- the people at that site have some sort of strange anti-PDF bias -- but if you've got Acrobat, you can always distill the WORD file. (Me, I have a horrible anti-WORD bias.)
More on the book, including a great introduction from Bob McChesney and Ben Scott, here, at Google Books -- where they also have some great, free download titles...
http://books.google.com/books?id=pZXZRxCVAZwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=upton+sinclair&sig=ACfU3U0B_XxuJsMYTurj9o6t_-1Nc9nIxw&hl=en#PPR9,M1or also here:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0502rwmscott.htm
Upton Sinclair and the Contradictions
of Capitalist Journalism
by Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott
Beginning in the 1980s, there was a significant increase in awareness of the deep flaws of mainstream journalism among those on the U.S. left. Writers such as Todd Gitlin, Herbert Schiller, Gaye Tuchman, Ben Bagdikian, and Michael Parenti, each in his or her own way, drew attention to the incompatibility between a corporate run news media and an ostensibly democratic society. The work of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in particular, introduced an entire generation of progressives to a critical position regarding mainstream journalism. As the title of their masterful Manufacturing Consent indicated, the capitalist news media are far more about generating support for elite policies than they are about empowering people to make informed political decisions.
What is not so well known across the left, not to mention elsewhere, is that this radical criticism of the limitations of a capitalist sponsored journalism is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it dates back to the birth, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of both modern monopoly capitalism and modern commercial media, roughly one hundred years ago. Radical criticism of the press was an integral component of the many large social movements of the Progressive Era...
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