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In this episode of our reading series, Robbie reads and provides real-time analysis of the opening chapter of the classic book, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media by Michael Parenti. The text explores the role that the media play in capitalism using a materialist, Marxist-Leninist analysis.

The reading begins with Robbie comparing and contrasting Inventing Reality with the better-known book on a similar topic, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Robbie highlights the main antagonisms between Chomsky and Parenti in their approach to this topic and explores why these antagonisms exist.

Robbie then dives into Inventing Reality, providing real-time analysis and commentary throughout. He presents Parenti's thesis and introduction to the content of the book before getting into some examples of how the media function under capitalism. Robbie uses the example of Skydance Media's merger with Paramount Global and the impact this had on CBS news and editorial coverage to explain Parenti's thesis on right-wing bias in the media.

The text explores how the mainstream media covers race, gender, and class, and how this coverage is a result of the class position of those who own and control the media. This also explains why the mainstream media rarely if ever explore the structural causes of many of the issues they report on in society. Parenti explores the conservative nature of mainstream media through a variety examples, including coverage of candidates for political office. Robbie reads Parenti's analysis and then applies it to our current time, connecting the dots from the 1980s and 1990s when Parenti was writing the book to the present.

Robbie takes the example of skewed coverage of third-party candidates during elections to again parse out the differences between Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent, introducing Chomsky's concept of "structural filters" and contrasting it with Parenti's emphasis on property relations and class-struggle.

The reading ends with an exploration of how the media set the parameters around what is acceptable and not acceptable to discuss publicly—framing the limits of allowable discourse in a way that does not require them to always be controlling our minds in an Orwellian sense. Parenti argues that it's often much easier and more effective for our ruling class to set the ideological tone and issue agenda with a much more insidious, subtle form of control than the nakedly brutish tactics of overt oppression.

Further resources:

Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media

Related episodes:

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