Upton Sinclair is best remembered for his novel The Jungle, the 1906 muckraking exposé of labor and sanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards. This was the Golden Age of radical press criticism, and Upton Sinclair was at its epicenter.
However, unlike today, radical criticism of capitalist journalism was a dominant theme on the left during the Progressive Era, particularly in the socialist, anarchist, and progressive press. It was a time of striking similarity to the present, mirroring in particular the corruption of democracy by political and economic elites whose control over the media strangles public awareness, debate, and activism. Radical criticism of the press was an integral component of the many large social movements of the Progressive Era, which sought to resist the effects of accelerating capitalist development. 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.
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. 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. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in particular, introduced an entire generation of progressives to a critical position regarding mainstream journalism. 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. This essay is adapted from the foreword to a new edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check to be published this fall by the University of Illinois Press.īeginning in the 1980s, there was a significant increase in awareness of the deep flaws of mainstream journalism among those on the U.S. BEN SCOTT is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. McCHESNEY is a coeditor of Monthly Review.