Obituary: Marxist historian and cultural critic Michael Parenti, 92, died on Saturday. He lived in Berkeley, California, for years.
He wrote many books from a "leftist" perspective. One of the most notable was his 1986 work, Inventing Reality, which was a critique of media. It was required reading on many college campuses. I read it around the time it came out. Of course, this was 1986, and the obvious right-wing slant of "news" became more and more apparent after the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the allowing of Rupert Murdoch to invest US media with his yellow journalism.
Snip:
Parenti, who lived long enough to take on prominent anti-Communist Leftists, including some views associated with Noam Chomsky and others, was born to a working-class family in East Harlem, New York, in 1933. He has written movingly about how his father sobbed years later when presented with an academic book his son had written and dedicated to him, unable to comprehend its contents. Throughout his life, Parenti never forgot where he came from: the working class.
After finishing school, he worked for several years before entering college, earning a BA from the City College of New York, an MA from Brown University, and later a PhD from Yale. Despite these formidable academic credentials, he was unable to secure positions at top-tier universities. This was both because of his activism and outspoken criticism of capitalism, as well as his sharp critiques of how the media portrayed what he described as the early achievements of socialism in the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere, including Cuba, where he travelled extensively to write and lecture on the gains of socialism and redistribution-oriented economic policies.
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This was one of the few sites to note his death.
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