1919 NEWSPAPERS = 2003 NEWSPAPERS? The Boston Globe's fine Ideas section had an interesting Q&A session Sunday with one of the professors who wrote a new introduction to Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check, the muckracking writer's left-leaning expose of journalistic excesses in the early 20th century. (Sample quote: "A modern newspaper, seen from the point of view of the workers, is a gigantic munition-factory, in which the propertied class manufactures mental bombs and gas-shells for the annihilation of its enemies.")

The Q&A is an interesting reminder that early media criticism in this country came from the left and was aimed at the so-called "capitalist press." The journalism practiced at that time by William Randolph Hearst and others was decidedly unsympathetic to working-class perspectives, but I have to wonder if the same criticism can be made today. Sure, you'll see puff pieces on the lifestyles of the rich and famous in current newspapers, but the idea that today the media only serve "the agenda, ideology, and policies of the monied elites who owned and controlled the newspapers" seems a bit of a reach. While business coverage may not be as hard-hitting as a Marxist academic might like it to be, there's no denying that there's plenty of sympathetic coverage on the plight of the poor. If the introduction to The Brass Check is analyzing today's media environment through the lens of a socialist pamphlet from 1919, then I'm not sure it's of much value.