You've got to be really careful here. The way you've asked the question is actually an example of what you're looking to investigate. the concentration on
construction and manipulation is - without realising it - coming down on one side of a long running argument about w/c capabilities and it's coming down on the wrong, top down side. Simply put, the sort of argument that Chomsky makes in Manufacturing consent is about
production/
transmission, it's a much more sophisticated version of the a lot of the idea that most people simply are given a pre-programmed diet of info which they uncritically internalise then go onto to legitimate and make common sense. Missing from this is any idea of the critical
reception of what is transmitted, the undermining of it, it's transformation, the counter-uses made of it etc. And for that you need Stuart Hall basically. For the cruder side, for more modern stuff i suppose you could look at the Bad News Series/
Greg Philo - though their latest book on labour and anti-semitism seems to have slipped into the former. Of course, annoyingly Hall became, not his fault, associated with the former through their misuse of his work, so much so that he was forced to say:
There is no more reductionist, instrumentalist, class-delusionary position than to assume that the extraordinary complexities of the society in which we live are really held together by the cement of the media’s messages. As crude as this may sound, a large part of the Marxist literature which tries to explain how Western societies are held together consensually—how the consensus is constructed, why it is that the working class is not revolutionary, and why it is that history is not following the punctuating rhythm of class struggle—relies on that position. Hegemony is not ideological mystification.
But it's really dangerous to just concentrate on one side, it's politically debilitating and it essentially reactionary - in a sense it's like a really bad middle class mirror of the worst crude sort of leninist vanguardism, almost an unwitting parody at times - and it's ran through the intellectual life of much of the left for far too long. I keep thinking back to the editors of the NLR writing to the BBC to aks them to stop playing american trash and fulfill their proper role to educate the w/c about proper legitimate and authorised culture.
Just to make clear, this isn't applying to you of course, but the way in which one perspective has become almost liberal lefty common sense, and we've just had, with some reactions to brexit perfect examples of this - oddly enough these types never mange to see themselves as stupid manipulated rag dolls, they manage to come to their own independent conclusions free of any social prejudice or anything like that.
