The Ideology of the Entertainment Media

Some Hollywood movies are platforms for jingoistic militarism and laced with racism. Take John Wayne in a Western, e.g., saying, “There’s humans and then there’s Comanches.” In a WWII movie, a GI says of the Japanese, “They’re not people. They live in the trees like apes.” Michael Parents asks, “How can we speak of Hollywood films and TV shows as being ‘purely’ entertainment when they regularly propagate certain political themes and carefully avoid others?” They are “permeated,” he says “with class, racial, gender, and other political biases.” “The Lone Ranger and Tonto,” Parenti says, “offer us a familiar media prototype of the domesticated imperialist relationship. When Third World people are not portrayed as heartless savages, that are cast as devoted subordinates.” The Stallone Rambo
Vietnam War character exemplifies the historical engineering in so many films: the U.S. was not the marauding invader but rather the victim of the perfidious Vietnamese and weak politicians in Washington.