patrick.net

The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? ... The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics.

...

In his 2008 New Left Review article 'Against diversity',
Walter Benn Michaels bluntly proposes that American liberals
tend to 'carry on about racism and sexism in order to avoid doing
so about capitalism' . Michaels observes that decades of anti-racist
and anti-sexist legislation and campaigning in the US, far from
reducing inequality, have been perfectly compatible with its
deepening:
... After half a century of anti­
racism and feminism, the US today is a less equal society than
was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore,
virtually all the growth in inequality has taken place since the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 - which means not
only that the successes of the struggle against discrimination
have failed to alleviate inequality, but that they have been
compatible with a radical expansion of it. Indeed, they have
helped to enable the increasing gulf between rich and poor.
When there is exploitation to be done, capitalism is essentially
blind to differences of gender, race and sexuality. Although
racism, sexism and homophobia often prove politically useful to
capitalists, it is perfectly possible, in theory at least, for
capitalism to offer formal equality to black people, women, and
homosexuals. It follows that feminism, civil rights and gay rights
movements do not in themselves threaten capitalism as class
struggles do. The attempts of New Left theoreticians and
contemporary hegemony theorists to posit the replacement of
the working class as a revolutionary subject with a coalition of
identity groups are therefore highly problematic.

Entire book here:
http://b2.ge.tt/gett/6AVQ10U/Harper%2C+Stephen+-+Beyond+the+Left.+The+Communist+Critique+of+the+Media.pdf?index=0&user=anon-sQWZjaT9go3VbqL9CANYjkWoRqYr4ujtsTMXFIqL-&pdf=