Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

A book which counters claims of Left-wing media bias. Chomsky actually claims the media is biased towards big business and government and provides a “propaganda model” which he claims demonstrates it.

The rest of the book is mainly history – Chomsky uses things like some murders in Central America, the attempted assassination of the Pope, and the Vietnam War, and demonstrates how the media was manipulated in all of them. Warning: there’s lots and lots of tedious history – at one point, it felt like more of a history of Vietnam.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything Chomsky wrote, but it’s an interesting counter-perspective.