Just finished reading the dense Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. While the bulk of the book is somewhat dated, exploring mostly the media’s treatment of the war in Vietnam, and conflicts in South America, the evergreen nugget is the framework for analyzing the mass media’s role in forwarding propaganda. Or, more formally known as the Propaganda Model.

(Personal tip:skip the book and just read the Wikipedia entry on the model. Or, get one of Chomsky’s more recent books that explore contemporary conflicts/issues.)

Two half-formed thoughts come to mind:

  1. Based on the ownership filter, to what extent do games get so much negative treatment in the mass media due to the fact that, for the most part, the game industry is not owned by the mass media (or rather, not owned by the multinational conglomerates that also own the mass media)? I believe some academics (my brain is telling me Henry Jenkins) have posited this in the past, in so much that games are competing with the mass media and their sister media for eyeballs and audience, etc, and because the parent companies of the mass media are not generally invested in games, they have no motivation to treat the game industry fairly or in an unbiased manner. Or, as the theory suggests, “maximizing profit means sacrificing news objectivity”.
  2. On the other hand, the funding filter (ie, interests of advertisers come before reporting the news) and sourcing filter (ie, being spoon fed “news” by industry) help us better understand why the dedicated gaming press is broken in many ways…

Anyway, not that these thoughts are particularly insightful or new. More just interesting to see them bundled up in a cohesive framework/model.