A Weird Contrast in Books. Part I

The Associated Press and Labor: Being Seven Chapters from the Brass Check; A Study of American Journalism by Upton Sinclair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Slate.com, I’ve now read Upton Sinclair’s “The Brass Check,” his critique of the “concrete wall” of early 20th century journalism.

Sinclair might be pleased to know that with the passing of a century, American journalism has improved. Somewhat. Though he might find some situations the same, albeit with different characters.

(This is an interesting contrast to my other read this week, Gary Allen’s critique of Richard Nixon from the right-wing. Surely if Allen and Sinclair were to find themselves in the same room, some kind of matter/anti-matter explosion would occur.)

The journalism Sinclair describes reminds me of the “fake news” phenomena we witness today on the Internet. I have to wonder if it’s gullibility of the reader, the gall of the fake news producer, or a combination of blissful ignorance and “I don’t have time for this” that makes such fake news proliferate. Facebook (something I’m sure Sinclair would find appealing and appalling at the same time) is working on a fake news detector so we can see, sometime soon, whether we fell for or followed fake news on our feeds. The question is: will the detector be fake news itself?

I feel we’re in the same kind of quandary Sinclair found himself in when newspapers were sending and receiving fake cablegrams on his behalf in order to get the story, or writing pure fiction about him running a ranch for ne’er-do-well boys in Nevada while he was living in Bermuda. There’s such a proliferation of news and “news” thanks to the Internet, he might even find himself wishing for the halcyon days when the press was a “concrete wall” or symbolized by the metal bars of a prison cell. The mainstream press may have much higher ethical ideals (somewhat) than in his day, but in our day, who wants to listen to the mainstream press?

It’s interesting, too, that Slate would publish this work as a literary-critiquey message to the new owners of the LA Weekly, who apparently are Trump supporters (!) who have fired most of the paper’s writers and want free contributions from the unwashed masses. (Had they been liberal owners, I suspect Slate wouldn’t be reacting this way; rather they’d briefly lament the state of modern journalism and leave it at that.)

But it doesn’t matter. It got me to read Upton Sinclair, something I’ve been meaning to do since I found a copy of The Jungle at the thrift store who knows how long ago. (I’ve read plenty by Sinclair Lewis, whom I often confuse with Upton Sinclair, however.)

I suppose the bottom line is we still have a national press controlled by business interests, a national press that often fakes ethicality as long as some political line is toed (and again, both sides of the American spectrum do this) or if there’s an element of sensationalism about the story to be told. Not that we don’t have reporters and organizations with high ethical standards that are worth far more than the powder it would take to blow them up – it’s just that the elements Sinclair decried in journalism are pretty much intact in the broad spectrum of what we call news.


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