The Brass Check
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The Brass Check
''The Brass Check'' is a muckraking exposé of American journalism by Upton Sinclair published in 1919. It focuses mainly on newspapers and the Associated Press wire service, along with a few magazines. Other critiques of the press had appeared, but Sinclair reached a wider audience with his personal fame and lively, provocative writing style. Among those critiqued was William Randolph Hearst, who made routine use of yellow journalism in his widespread newspaper and magazine business. Sinclair called ''The Brass Check'' "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written." The University of Illinois Press released a new edition of the book in 2003, which contains a preface by Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott. The text is also freely available on the Internet, as Sinclair opted not to copyright the text in an effort to maximize its readership. For much of Sinclair's career he was known as a "two book author": for writing ''The Jungle'' and ''The Brass Check.''McChes ...
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Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel, ''The Jungle'', which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published ''The Brass Check'', a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after publication of ''The Brass Check'', the first code of ethics for journ ...
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Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptized 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics"——— or "The Father of Capitalism",———— he wrote two classic works, ''The Theory of Moral Sentiments'' (1759) and ''The Wealth of Nations, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'' (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as ''The Wealth of Nations'', is considered his ''magnum opus'' and the first modern work that treats economics as a comprehensive system and as an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of God's will, God’s will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic and technological factors and the interactions between them. Among other economic theories, the work introduced Smith's idea of absolute advantage. Smith studied social philos ...
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Propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in news and journalism, government, advertising, entertainment, education, and activism and is often associated with material which is prepared by governments as part of war efforts, political campaigns, health campaigns, revolutionaries, big businesses, ultra-religious organizations, the media, and certain individuals such as soapboxers. In the 20th century, the English term ''propaganda'' was often associated with a manipulative approach, but historically, propaganda has been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions or ideologies. Equivalent non-English terms have also la ...
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Investigative Journalism
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting." Most investigative journalism has traditionally been conducted by newspapers, wire services, and freelance journalists. With the decline in income through advertising, many traditional news services have struggled to fund investigative journalism, due to it being very time-consuming and expensive. Journalistic investigations are increasingly carried out by news organizations working together, even internationally (as in the case of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers), or by organizations such as ProPublica, which have not operated previously as news publishers and which rely on the support of the public and benefact ...
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First Red Scare
The First Red Scare was a period during History of the United States (1918–1945), the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of Far-left politics, far-left movements, including Bolshevik, Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included the Russian 1917 October Revolution and 1919 United States anarchist bombings, anarchist bombings. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of socialism, communism and Anarchism in the United States, anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of concern. The Scare had its origins in the hyper-nationalism of World War I as well as the Russian Revolution. At the war's end, following the October Revolution, American authorities saw the threat of communist revolution in the actions of Trade union, organized labor, including such disparate cases as the Seattle General Stri ...
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Industrial Workers Of The World
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed "Wobblies", is an international labor union that was founded in Chicago in 1905. The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain. IWW ideology combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements. In the 1910s and early 1920s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American West, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries. At their peak in August 1917, IWW membership was estimated at more than 150,000, with active wings in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia. The extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated ...
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Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike Of 1912
The Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, or the Paint Creek Mine War, was a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia, centered on the area enclosed by two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek. The strike lasted from April 18, 1912, through July 1913. After the confrontation, Fred Stanton, a banker, estimated that the strike and ensuing violence cost $100,000,000. The confrontation directly caused perhaps fifty violent deaths, as well as many more deaths indirectly caused by starvation and malnutrition among the striking miners. In the number of casualties it counts among the worst conflicts in American labor union history. The strike was a prelude to subsequent labor-related West Virginia conflicts in the following years, the Battle of Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain. The demands The violence on Paint Creek and Cabin Creek began with a United Mine Workers of America strike in April 1912. Prior to the strike the ...
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JSTOR
JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. , more than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries had access to JSTOR. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge. JSTOR's revenue was $86 million in 2015. History William G. Bowen, president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988, founded JSTOR in 1994. JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehen ...
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Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organisation, and many other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate and complete piece of work. The editing process often begins with the author's idea for the work itself, continuing as a collaboration between the author and the editor as the work is created. Editing can involve creative skills, human relations and a precise set of methods. There are various editorial positions in publishing. Typically, one finds editorial assistants reporting to the senior-level editorial staff and directors who report to senior executive editors. Senior executive editors are responsible for developing a product for its final release. The smaller the publication, the more these roles overlap. The top editor ...
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Publisher
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newspapers, and magazines. With the advent of digital information systems, the scope has expanded to include electronic publishing such as E-book, ebooks, academic journals, micropublishing, Electronic publishing, websites, blogs, video game publisher, video game publishing, and the like. Publishing may produce private, club, commons or public goods and may be conducted as a commercial, public, social or community activity. The commercial publishing industry ranges from large multinational conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, RELX, Pearson plc, Pearson and Thomson Reuters to thousands of small independents. It has various divisions such as trade/retail publishing of fiction and non-fiction, educational publishing K–12, (k-12) and Academic publi ...
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Tabloid (newspaper Format)
A tabloid is a newspaper with a compact page size smaller than broadsheet. There is no standard size for this newspaper format. Etymology The word ''tabloid'' comes from the name given by the London-based pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. to the compressed tablets they marketed as "Tabloid" pills in the late 1880s. The connotation of ''tabloid'' was soon applied to other small compressed items. A 1902 item in London's ''Westminster Gazette'' noted, "The proprietor intends to give in tabloid form all the news printed by other journals." Thus ''tabloid journalism'' in 1901, originally meant a paper that condensed stories into a simplified, easily absorbed format. The term preceded the 1918 reference to smaller sheet newspapers that contained the condensed stories. Types Tabloid newspapers, especially in the United Kingdom, vary widely in their target market, political alignment, editorial style, and circulation. Thus, various terms have been coined to descr ...
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