I thought this was an intelligent observation: This fascinating history serves to introduce the major thesis of Influencing Machine: that the "media machine" that cynically distorts in order to serve the rich and powerful is a delusion. The reality is that the "media agenda" is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously from commercial constraints, human frailty, state interference, and cognitive blindspots.
From one of the reviews on Amazon All media products are inherently biased, so as the audience it's our duty simply to identify these biases as they reveal themselves. Gladstone, however, addresses the question of bias by pulling back to the 50,000-foot level and positioning the "boring" controversy about "political bias" alongside the far less obvious biases that we really "should worry about"--commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias, narrative bias, and, most iconoclastically, fairness bias.
Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone's comic about media theory is serious but never dull - Boing Boing |
