Marxism and the News

   This week our group was assigned the reading the Reali-TV. While I found this reading interesting, I turned towards the Marxism reading after completing ours to better understand what Marxism could possibly be doing in today's media and society. While reading the piece talks a lot about Marxist ideals and how it is still prevalent today through television and other public sources.Marxism is defined as an economic and political theory that holds that actions and human institutions are economically determined, that the class struggle is the basic agency of historical change, and that capitalism will ultimately be superseded by communism. After reading this I came across an article from 2011 that talked about media bias in missing kid’s coverage. Media is used as an amplifier according to Marxist political theory; mass media has a tendency to avoid the unpopular and draw towards most valued and legitimate. Marxist theorists agree that mass media has ideological power, but disagrees as to its nature. This can be related to the ideology section of the reading saying that Marxists believe that the material dominant class is at the same time the intellectual dominant class, which in turn is those who report on and cover the mass media to the world. 
     The article I was reading talks about a child going missing and the family complaining about getting media coverage at first but after months into the case the media had totally dropped them. The article also talks about how this child’s case isn't unique and of the thousands of missing children reported each year, only a select few receive a heightened level of coverage. Experts say those cases often meet certain criteria. The text in which I am speaking about can be found in the article through the link here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500172_162-20118068.html