Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media. 2nd edition. New York: St.Martin's Press, 1993. 274 pages.

Michael Parenti earned a Ph.D. from Yale in 1962, and now lives in Berkeley, California. He has written a number of dissident books on U.S. culture and politics. Since the American left disappeared, Parenti is perhaps the only remaining scholar who a) takes the idea of interlocking power elites seriously, b) believes that conspiracies can happen in high places, c) hasn't burned all of his Marx, Engels, and Gramsci, d) writes lucidly, with numerous concrete examples and footnotes, and e) can still get published without using the Internet.

This book is about the U.S. media, who controls the news, and how and why they do it. If you've been deeply tuned into American culture and world events since the 1960s, and are well-informed about media elites and their spin cycles, corporate power and propaganda, and the role of the CIA and other government agencies, then you don't need this book. If not, then it will introduce a phenomenon that continues to emerge as one of the most significant political forces of our era. (Of the 274 pages, only three or four seem ill-advised -- a section on class, race, and gender in the first chapter. These pages read like an obligatory sop to political correctness, and they lack any sense of how of how race and gender can be used by elites and the media to deflect and obscure class consciousness.)
ISBN 0-312-02013-9

Extract the names from this source

Back to search page