Make-believe media
Subtitle: the politics of entertainment
By: Michael Parenti.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1992
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 241
Subjects: Motion pictures -- Political aspects -- United States; Television and politics -- United States; Television broadcasting -- United States -- Influence; Social values
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-230) and index.
Table of contents: title: Political entertainment. Seeing is believing -- Preempting life -- Swarthy hordes and other aliens. The wagon circle -- Tonto, Gunga Din, and all that -- More of the same : with some exceptions -- Hardliners and "antiterrorists" -- Monsters and galactic aliens -- The media fight the red menace. Witch-hunts and stereotypes -- Rambo and the Reaganite cinema -- The wide weird world of sports -- Make-believe history -- Nice tyrants and bad revolutions -- No better than the textbooks -- Blue-collar blues. Workers from nowhere -- Buffoons, bigots, and loveable boys -- Class and virtue -- No-good unions -- Doing it better -- Affluent class and corporate brass. Escaping class -- Trauma in soapville -- The rise of the "oil operas" -- Benign bosses and bad bosses -- Superdocs and shoot-'em-ups. The magic medicine show  -- Bang! Bang! You're dead -- Making it look "realistic" -- Black images in white media. Smilin' `n' servin' -- Clean-cut and saintly -- Enter superhero -- Two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back -- Getting serious -- Luigi, Tony, and the family. The stages of stereotype -- Sempre mafia -- Spaghetti benders for Madison Avenue -- Internalizing the false image -- Child abuse. Zapping young minds -- The Saturday morning massacre -- The little consumers -- Preemption, profits, and censors -- Retarding our capacities -- The money media -- Product control -- The myth of cultural democracy -- Giving the people what they want -- What does the public want? -- Pseudorelevance and pseudochoice -- Doing it right.