Brasscheck

Click here for: Brasscheck TV - The current video site

Click here for: The archival text-only site (1997-2002)

Brasscheck was started in early 1997 as a part-time effort by Internet pioneer Ken McCarthy to demonstrate the kind of in-depth reporting and analysis of the news that the Internet made possible.

It preceded The Charlotte Observer's Jonathan Dube's Hurricane Bonnie blog, often credited as the first blog to focus on a news story, by a full year.

The original focus of the site was local news reporting and since McCarthy lived in San Francisco at the time, he focused on San Francisco stories. One of the stories he covered was the fraudulent activity surrounding the June 1997 49er stadium bond election. In 1999, he expanded his scope to cover international stories most notably the U.S.-led NATO attack on the civilians in the former Yugoslavia. In 2022, he published a book based on the website's contents "78 Days of Terror."

In 2005, when it became simple to post and stream video from the Internet, he began adding video content to the site and Brasscheck was a leader in the now common practice of combining video with news stories.

In 2008, a film he wrote and produced, "The Katrina Myth", was consistently one of the top 10 YouTube news videos during both the Republican and Democratic conventions and the week in between, a feat achieved by no other video during that period. This marked a turning point in the public's understanding of the true causes of the destruction of New Orleans in 2005. The story is documented in the book Words Whispered in Water by Sandy Rosenthal.

On February 1, 2020, McCarthy posted a tweet expressing skepticism about the official reports coming out of Wuhan, China regarding a reported viral outbreak there. (His account was subsequently frozen by Twitter and he is unable to post to or use his account to this day.) Starting with that post, he tracked the "pandemic" daily. Some of his writings on the subject appear in the book Unraveling the COVID Con: How One Marketer Exposed the Truth When It Mattered.(Volumes I and II)

These were followed by the book What the Nurses Saw - Systemic Medical Murder in U.S. Hospitals During the CoVid Panic and the Nurses Who Fought to Stop It.

He is currently working on a follow-up book tentatively titled "The Nuremberg Code and Its Modern Enemies".

Bio - Ken McCarthy, Brasscheck's foudner

Time Magazine (March, 2014) credited Ken McCarthy with being the person who had the fundamental insight that made it possible to transform the Internet from a non-commercial technical platform to the world's biggest marketplace and publishing platform.

His insight? That clicks had a commercial value and that their value was variable depending on audience. This insight is literally the foundation that made online businesses like Google and Facebook and millions of others possible.

In addition to this contribution, Ken was also:

1) the first to publish an article about email as a marketing tool in a marketing industry publication (1994)

2) one of the primary pioneers of the banner ad (1994)

3) early pioneer of auto-responder marketing (1996)

4) early pioneer of pay-per-click marketing (2001)

5) introduced "push button" audio to the Internet (2002), the foundation of the podcasting industry

6) early pioneer of practical online video marketing (2005), though he published the first article on the subject in 1994, and

7) early pioneer of mobile marketing (2008)

Click here for: Brasscheck TV - The current video site
Click here for: The archival text-only site (1997-2002)

Looking for Brasscheck TV? Click here

If you are looking for our most current reporting, you can find it at Brasscheck TV.

To reach Brasscheck TV click here

The Brasscheck.com Historical Archive

This web page contains the index to the archive of Brasscheck.com, a pioneering effort of independent journalism on the Internet that operated from 1997 to 2002.

Brasscheck.com was the first web site to report on election fraud in the US in depth (1997) and was one of the very earliest news services to seriously question government/media claims about the September 11 attacks.

Effective August 1, 2002:
The domain name brasscheck.com
and all intellectual property contained on web sites under brasscheck.com
has become the property of the First Amendment Defense Trust
which is solely responsible for its contents.

Brasscheck.com
(1997-2002)

"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

September 11, 2001: Fraud and Treason on an Unimaginable Scale

  • Facts about the nature and scope of the terrorist threat to America are being actively withheld from the public.What you are not being told (Published on September 24, 2001. This pagehas not been updated since this date.)

    Chemically Induced Compliance: The Drugging of Kids and Garbage Science in America

  • Over 1,000,000 American school children are given daily doses of amphetamines and amphetamine-like drugs to regulate their behavior. Why?

    A skeptical view of the anti-gun crusade

  • The "we must do something" chant has resulted in the creation of over 30,000 SWATteams, undercover cops roaming the streets intimidating and sometimes killing innocent people, and the terror bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia. Now the very same people behind these atrocities want to ban private ownership of firearms. Does this really makes sense?

    No on Prop 21

  • A so called "anti-crime" measure so repressive that even the LAPD and San Francisco Chronicle are against it. Another scam from the Prison Industrial Complex

    Postcards from Seattle

  • Who planned and ordered the terror tactics used by Seattle police and others at the WTO meeting?

    The NATO created catastrophe in Yugoslavia

  • The war day by day

    Pacifica board sabotages 50 years of free speech radio

  • The Clinton era's version of book burning

    People we admire

  • John Heartfield: Heartfield vs. Hitler
  • George Seldes: Tell the Truth and Run
  • Wei Jingsheng: The Courage to Stand Alone
  • Bill Mandel: Hear him rip into the House Un-American Activities Committee

    San Francisco: America's Digital Age Banana Republic

  • Jonestown: A tragedy made in San Francisco
  • In broad daylight: Another stolen election in San Francisco
  • Violence on demand: Politically motivated police brutality
  • How little things have changed : George Seldes' Report on the performance of San Francisco's press during the 1934 general strike

    Reporting from the Inner City

  • News, analysis and activism from a world the US media ignores. Based in the Bronx, but a model for the nation.

    Important San Francisco writers

  • Gray Brechin: Imperial San Francisco
  • Chris Carlsson: Reclaiming San Francisco : History, Politics, Culture (an editorial collaboration with James Brook and Nancy J. Peters)

    Highly recommended e-mail publications

  • The Agribusiness Examiner
    Monitoring corporate agribusiness from a public interest perspective
    To subscribe, send request to: avkrebs@earthlink.net
  • Focus on the Corporation
    Weekly joint report from the Corporate Crime Reporter and theMultinational Monitor.
    To subscribe to corp-focus, send an e-mailmessage to listproc@essential.org with the following all in one line: subscribe corp-focus (no period)
  • The Progressive Review
    "Washington's Most Unofficial Source"
    To subscribe, send request to: ssmith@igc.org
  • Mediabeat
    Norman Solomon's weekly analysis of the US news media
    To subscribe, send request to: mediabeat@igc.apc.org

    More

  • Other Brasscheckprojects
  • Resources for news and media analysis
  • Civilian authorities train to combat gas attacks
  • Conversations with the General - Science and fraud in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation
  • Extended interview with Brasscheck's founder Ken McCarthy. If you want to know who we are and why we do what we do, it's all here.

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    Some of journalism's "old guard" are finally starting to catch on. Welcome. It's better late than never.

    "There are a lot of things going on that nobody seems to want to talk about. It's a bad era. A very bad era."

    - Jimmy Breslin - February 15, 1999