Brass Check

Upton Sinclair was born September 20, 1878. He was a bestselling American author and journalist who penned more than one hundred books, plays, and journalistic articles during the course of his career. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1943. Time magazine called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence.” He died on November 25, 1968.Gavin de Becker is a bestselling author and security specialist, primarily for governments, large corporations, and public figures. He is the chairman of Gavin de Becker and Associates, which he founded in 1978. He is the bestselling author of The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence.

"In 1920, Upton Sinclair, an outsider to journalism, wrote The Brass Check, the first book exposing the press. It was this book, plus a friendship with the author lasting many years, that influenced me and the books I wrote on the press, beginning in the 1930's." —George Seldes"Though Sinclair’s The Brass Check has been almost entirely forgotten by history, it’s not only fascinating but a timeless perspective. Sinclair deeply understood the economic incentives of early 20th century journalism and thus could predict and analyze the manipulative effect it had on The Truth. He exposes these matters just as he did in The Jungle and his other muckraking exposes—but in this case, he’s muckraking the muckrakers. Today, the incentives and pressures acting on the media are different but they warp our information in a similar way. In almost every substantial charge Upton leveled against the yellow press, you could, today, sub in blogs and the cable news cycle and be even more correct." —The Observer