Elizabeth Byrne - Herman and Chomsky

The first paragraph of the reading immediately caught my attention which is - "the mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulful this role requires systematic propaganda."
In the first sentence it declares that the mass media serves to send a message out to the public and in this I went back to “pleasure derives from pain”. Why does out media chose to put other people down to get amusement from the public. It is the medias “function to amuse, entertain, and inform—however it seems as though the amusement comes from making fun of something or someone else (South Park on Brittany Spears) and what really is our entertainment? Action movies that blow up buildings and people die- and then how does that affect how and what we feel about 9/11 or natural disasters when we have already seen produced by a director?
In our culture it is the wealthy ruling class who decides what goes on the television. I was in a class earlier this semester where we talking about how the percentage of white people compared to black on crime tv or news is much less. This is because the wealthy people can afford to get lawyers to get them out of trouble. Leaving the lower class to constantly be shown in the negative light.
The mass media can get any message they want- sometimes it is something that don’t mean to. What is left unsaid is for the public to interpret.