Robert W. McChesney

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Waterman McChesney is a media critic, academic, and activist. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies.

Dr. Robert McChesney

McChesney was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He and John Bellamy Foster studied together at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. In his early years, he worked as a sports stringer for United Press International (UPI), published a weekly newspaper, and in 1979 was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle-based rock magazine which chronicled the birth of the Seattle rock scene of the late 1980s and 1990s. McChesney received a Ph.D. in communications at the University of Washington in 1989. From 1988 to 1998 he was on the Journalism and Mass Communications faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He is also the founder and president of Free Press and host of the radio show Media Matters, broadcast on WILL-AM at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science.

He was a former editor of the Monthly Review and now a director of the foundation that operates the magazine.

He is married to Inger Stole and has two daughters.

In a September 24, 2001 interview in LiP Magazine, Dr. McChesney stated that the sanctions imposed after the Gulf War "led up to the death of up to a million civilians, including perhaps as many as 500,000 children." [1] This statement by Dr. McChesney is corroborated in the UNICEF report entitled "Results of the 1999 Iraq Child and Infant Mortality Surveys." [2]

1 Contributions to Media Reform
2 Books
3 Articles
4 External links

[edit] Contributions to Media Reform

Dr. McChesney is perhaps best known for his work in the area of media reform. He proposes that the notion of a deregulated media is a complete misnomer. The media is, instead, a governmentally sanctioned oligopoly, owned by a few highly profitable corporate entities. These concerns jealously guard their privilege through legislative influence and through use of their control of news coverage, by which means they distort public understanding of media issues. McChesney pinpoints the beginning of governmental oversight with the regulatory role imposed on the U.S. government at the advent of broadcast, where government was required to enforce the broadcasting rights of a limited number of participants.

McChesney sees the Communications Act of 1934 as essentially allowing monopolistic rights to broadcasters who had shown the greatest propensity for profit. Subsequent to this act were the provisions of the Fairness Doctrine, which had provisions for public interest broadcasting due to the scarcity of the broadcasting resource. These restrictions were later overturned in the 1980's under the banner of "deregulation."

Policy debates focus on marginal and tangential issues because core structures and policies are off-limits to criticism. In this environment, policy debates tend to gravitate to the elite level and public participation virtually disappears. After all, for most people, minor media policy issues are far down the list of important topics. Sweeping media reform is unthinkable - and politically impossible. The public's elimination from the process is encouraged by the corruption of the U.S. political system, in which politicians tend to be comfortable with the status quo and not inclined to upset powerful commercial media owners and potential campaign contributors. The dominant media firms enjoy the power to control news coverage of debates over media policies; this is a power they have used shamelessly to trivialize, marginalize, and distort opposition to the status quo (McChesney, 2004) .

He appeared in the 2004 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave.

[edit] Books

1993, 2004: Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935
1997: Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy
1997: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (with Edward Herman)
1999, 2000: Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
2000: It's the Media, Stupid! (with John Nichols)
- forewords by: Paul Wellstone, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Ralph Nader
2002: Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (with John Nichols)
- introductions by Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Barbara Ehrenreich
2003: The Big Picture: Understanding Media Through Political Economy (with John Bellamy Foster)
2004: The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century
2004: Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism (edited with Ben Scott)
2005: Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sells War, Spins Elections, and Destroys Democracy (with John Nichols)

[edit] Articles

1998: Making Media Democratic, Boston Review. Many people consider this article to be the intellectual seed which gave birth to the Indymedia Media movement.