The Media's Role in Upholding Capitalism (and Protecting the Cops)

Introduction

The entire spectrum, large and small, of bourgeois media outlets (The Washington Post, The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, The Cincinnati Enquirer, etc.) is owned and controlled by the capitalist ruling class. Its goal isn't to uncover facts or hold power accountable, but to maintain social control and uphold capitalism. Every headline and editorial filters reality through the lens of elite interests who decide what the working class sees, how they see it, and what they are allowed to think.

One of the media's more insidious tools is known as "copaganda," which includes media portrayals that glorify police violence, frame cops as heroic protectors or neutral arbiters of justice, and spread moral panic. Copaganda reinforces the legitimacy of state violence while avoiding mention of its systemic role in upholding class rule. Coverage of policing and state violence relies heavily on pro-police narratives, neutral or euphemistic language like "officer-involved shooting", and a passive writing voice (such as saying "a victim was shot" as opposed to "police shot a victim") to sanitize violence and remove responsibility from the perpetrator.

This isn't sloppy reporting or the occasional mistake; it's structural, built into the way media is owned, funded, and tied to state institutions. Though they sometimes dress in different clothes—reactionary "law and order" and liberal "reform"—they serve the same purpose: manufacturing consent to state violence.

A History of Complicity

The media's complicity in state violence isn't a new phenomenon. It's a long-established pattern.

When the FBI and Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton in 1969, the press reported a "shootout." That's what the police called it, so that's what the headlines said. There was no scrutiny or skepticism. Only later, after the Black Panthers opened their apartment to the public to see the evidence themselves, did independent reporting reveal that the police fired nearly 100 shots while the Panthers fired one. Hampton had been drugged and murdered in his sleep.

In 2001, Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) shot and killed Timothy Thomas while fleeing a minor traffic stop. The media ran with police narratives and treated the killing as unfortunate but justifiable. Coverage repeated police narratives of "split-second decisions" and officers' supposed "fear," pointing to Thomas's record of minor traffic violations rather than interrogating CPD's repeated violence against Black men and the material conditions of racial capitalism.

In 2015, Ray Tensing, a University of Cincinnati campus police officer, shot and killed Sam DuBose during a traffic stop. Coverage again emphasized the officer's "fear" of being dragged by a car, not on the split-second decision to execute an unarmed Black man. Even after the police narrative was disproven, the media had publicized the lie so effectively that the case against Tensing was dropped after jury deadlock resulted in two mistrials.

These aren't individual failures. This is what the bourgeois media is structured to do. It privileges police accounts, suppresses public outrage, and attempts to render the violence of the state inevitable, excusable, or invisible.

Silence and Spotlight

Countless acts of state violence—ICE raids that tear families apart, jail deaths that go uninvestigated, police abuses that never make headlines—are deliberately ignored or buried by the media. Bourgeois media outlets act as gatekeepers, controlling what reaches the public eye to limit awareness, short-circuit outrage, and disrupt or prevent collective resistance.

But silence is only part of the equation. Some stories are drained of their politics, reduced to isolated "tragedies" or unfortunate realities of life. A man dies in a cage because of "neglect," "mismanagement," or "medical emergencies," not because cages are built to kill slowly. Children are bombed in "mistakes," not as the direct result of foreign policy decisions.

Other stories become matters of individual wrongdoing. The issue isn't ICE, it's this raid or this specific agent. Not the police, but that specific cop. Structural violence is reduced to singular actors conveniently removed from their context and treated as exceptions to the norm. This redirects criticism away from the system toward the "bad apple" even though the entire orchard is sick.

Finally, the media legitimizes state violence with the language of restraints, neutrality, and protocol. "Law enforcement officials" are portrayed as professionals managing a situation. Murder becomes "use of force." By granting state actors the benefit of the doubt, media narratives recenter the system as fundamentally reasonable or natural, even when its results are horrific.

The Case of Ryan and Rodney Hinton

After the murder of 18-year-old Ryan Hinton back in May 2025, coverage largely followed official lines. Media outlets ran headlines portraying him as armed and dangerous, focusing on the phrase "he's got a gun" heard on body-camera audio, even though the footage does not show him pointing it at officers.

When Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich said that the murder was "legally justified," bourgeois reporting emphasized her legal reasoning, citing the near-instant decision-making window and, once again, officers' "fear." There was no official interrogation of the ambiguity of the video nor of broader patterns of police violence in Cincinnati.

The Hinton family disputed official findings. A family attorney responded by pointing out that the footage is blurry, and that despite the mostly unclear footage, Ryan can clearly be seen running away from police. They suggested a potential lawsuit, highlighting that no grand jury hearing was held—a decision that underlines how state-approved narratives can be closed off from public scrutiny.

Ryan's father, Rodney Hinton Jr., allegedly drove his car into a retired sheriff's deputy. Once the incident occurred, the media shifted almost instantly to weaponize Ryan's own father against him. Rodney was depicted as a violent criminal, and the matter was described as "calculated and premeditated" with minimal framing of context or Rodney's trauma. No mainstream stories connected Rodney's grief to ongoing state violence. Instead, the press presented him using the same narratives they deploy to rationalize police brutality. It then inserted mentions of Rodney and the deputy into stories about Ryan in an attempt to characterize both father and son as inherently aggressive and to rationalize the abject violence visited upon them as "justified."

Coverage of both Ryan and Rodney has faded. The Hinton family continues to fight for justice and transparency, but the press treats their stories as individual issues rather than as evidence of a system that silences victims and punishes mourning.

Function, Not Flaw

From a Marxist perspective, the media is not just a communication tool, but a key ideological institution. It helps reproduce ruling-class hegemony by defining what is "reasonable," "objective," or "normal" while pushing alternatives outside the bounds of acceptable debate. In doing so, it narrows political imagination and legitimizes the systems we're meant to question. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman explore how structural filters like corporate ownership, advertising, sourcing, and ideological bias shape news coverage to serve elite interests. Rather than simply distorting reality, the media constructs it, providing a supposedly "objective" or "unbiased" rationale for public consent to the status quo.

When protests erupt, media outlets focus on disorder and looting, often reducing movements to violent "riots," rather than focusing on the reasons people are fighting back. As the US is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, the media—rather than conducting honest investigations into Israel's campaign of terror—produces headlines that refer to the deliberate mass starvation of Palestinians as "hunger" and call the genocide a "war." This framing keeps the public confused, fearful, and divided.

Conclusion

The media's role in upholding the capitalist state will not change through reform. A media system designed to justify violence and bourgeois supremacy cannot be rehabilitated for the working class. It must be confronted as part of the broader machinery of state power, alongside the cops it defends, the prisons it ignores, the borders it upholds, and the bosses it answers to.

If truth is the goal, the working class must build independent platforms and revolutionary media that tell the stories the ruling class wants buried. For working-class journalists, the task is not to polish the chains of bourgeois outlets but to link arms with independent media and movements that fight for liberation. If justice is the goal, the people must be organized against police, against ICE, against the capitalist state, and against the press that shields it all.

Finally, the working and poor masses of Cincinnati must not accept CPD's narrative. CPD murdered Ryan Hinton.