Transparency Is the Only Way to Restore Trust in Journalism
Upton Sinclair made history with his muckraking.
In 1904, Sinclair went undercover in Chicago to investigate how meat was made in America. What the 26-year-old writer discovered horrified him. Those horrors turned into “The Jungle,” his 1906 novel that exposed the dangerous, oppressive, and appalling working conditions immigrant laborers endured in America’s meat industry.
“This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”
“There were cattle which had been fed on ‘whisky-malt,’ the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called ‘steerly’ — which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man’s sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or clear his eyes so that he could see?”
“The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these…
