Inventing Reality : The Politics of News Media

Rating:
Summary: Not the left that the country needs
Review: I believe that the country needs a principled, decent left viewpoint which is accesible to most Americans. Parenti, however, is not this left commentator, and this book is evidence of how out of touch he is.

Parenti is no better than the conservatives who lionize Ronald Reagan and make apologies for anything that any Republican does. He uses all of the same tricks of far right but in service of the far left. And by far left, I mean the communist, paranoid, conspiracy-theory left.

Parenti, to put it bluntly, is an apologist for communism. If you read Parenti, you will be forced to believe that communist nations such as the old USSR were really workers' paradises and utopias of enlightened policy and good governance. He is happy to point out the excesses of right wing creeps such as Pinocchet and various US-supported dictators in Africa, but he refuses to see any flaws in such genocidal communist monsters as Stalin or Pol Pot. He glosses over the awful repression that these creeps foisted upon Jews, dissenters, intellectuals, the clergy, etc.

If we want to get beyond the tired left-right divide, we need writers who are willing to take on the icons of both the left and right and give credit to policies which work, regardless of the ideological source of those ideas. Parenti's most recent work, "To Kill a Nation", praises Milosevic!

No one who is not already a communist will be swayed by his arguments.

Rating:
Summary: The nature of propaganda
Review: Parenti is an angry guy. Convinced that the American mass media is deliberately misleading the public in order to futher corporate and political interests, he has offered forth this treatise as a warning.

Some of Parenti's criticisms are valid, and much of the distortion he perceives is real, but we have to ask ourselves, how many times have we heard this before? I first encountered Parenti in college. His books were being "taught" in some of the mass communications courses. He is unapologetic in his Marxist sympathies, and seems to think that the press can, and should, exist as an instrument of a socialist state. That it is the duty of the media to inform the public.

Save for NPR and public television, the corporations which control American mass media have only one allegiance, and that is to the share holders. Market forces dictate how the press responds to world events. If people want conservative commentary like "The O'Reilly Factor", they will vote with their dollars. Likewise, if they want to read Parenti, they know where to find him. The idea that the press should be "objective" is naive.

Ultimately, Parenti's book degenerates into Chomsky-like conspiracy-theory hysterics. Fortunately for the public, his brand of Marxism is quickly becoming yesterday's news. And like Chomsky, Parenti finds it easier to write these unscholarly rants than to produce soemthing of substance. But the audience gets smaller everyday.

Rating:
Summary: A Tool that Can Change the World
Review: The media is a weapon. And in order to exist safely in this world, people must be armed with the knowledge that Michael Parenti exposes in INVENTING REALITY. In a world where people are manipulated and miseducated by the news media, every high school student should have this book in his/her current events class. It is a powerful read with an excellent empirical background. Workers and intellectuals alike need such a book if they are ever to improve this world.