Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our idealized vision of a “free press” was actually hampered by the power of big business, the wealthy, and government.
McChesney came from my favorite subgenre of media scholars: those who had a career in working journalism before entering the hallways of academe. He was a sports stringer for UPI and — even more hardcore — an ace ad salesman. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, the Seattle alt newspaper that would become the bible of the Pacific Northwest music scene, including being the first to write about Nirvana.1
Ironically, his primary contribution to The Rocket’s editorial ethos seems to have been to convince its staffers to cover mainstream acts (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Rush) alongside all the local indie bands they preferred — all “so that advertisers would believe that 100,000 people actually read our magazine…[we] participated in launching The Rocket not because we cared that much about music, but because we cared that much about publishing.” Not the early career you might expect from the man who’d become the country’s chief critic of corporate media ownership.
He left The Rocket to head to grad school at the University of Washington. His dissertation was titled “The Battle for America’s Ears and Minds: The Debate over the Control and Structure of American Radio Broadcasting, 1930-1935” — a prefiguration of his later work on the intersection of new technologies, government regulation, and the public sphere.2
After getting his PhD, McChesney settled in for decades of teaching, first at the University of Wisconsin and then the University of Illinois. He wrote a string of books that engaged with the state of the news media, most notably Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999), The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (2008), The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (2009, with John Nichols), Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It (2011, with Victor Pickard), and Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (2013). The core argument underlying all of them was that the structure of news media is inherently political, profoundly subject to manipulation by incumbent power, and in tension with the needs of a healthy democracy. He was working in the tradition of theorists like Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe, as well in the left-popularizer vein of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
In his dissertation, McChesney had written about the small-d democratic optimism that had accompanied the rise of radio in the 1920s, with many hoping that portions of the public airwaves could be dedicated to democratic discourse, education, and the information needs of civic life. (“It arguably constitutes the sole instance in which the structure and control of a major mass medium were subject to anything close to legitimate political debate in U.S. history.”) Within a few short years, though, the optimism faded as radio became a commercialized, corporatized medium built around advertising. That research prepared McChesney for the rhyming echo of those radio days that came with the rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s.
Once again, a new technology promised to raise new voices, break down old barriers to debate, and create a form of mass media that mirrored the requirements of democracy. But he argued, presciently, that the same old engines of power concentration would again constrain its usefulness. “The ways capitalism works and does not work determine the role the Internet might play in society,” he wrote in Digital Disconnect. He foretold the rise of a few large tech companies, “giant firms attempting to dominate [the internet] (and our politics),” a handful of “monopolistic firms that have capitalized on the digital revolution have grown to world-historical proportions.” He called the American idealistic vision of capitalism as a natural force for good “the catechism”:
The catechism has nothing to say about the caliber of American democracy, depoliticization, or public relations, nor do most of the people who write exegeses about the Internet. They take the existing state of affairs as the natural order of things and as “democracy.” Anything else, apparently, is pie-in-the-sky stuff and not part of grown-up conversations. The bar has been set so low that most Americans have only a hollowed-out notion of democracy: the act of voting for politicians you know little or nothing about, who probably will ignore you to the extent you are one of the few who has any idea what the key issues are. We are a long way from the vision of Paine or Franklin or Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson made the same case, arguing that merely voting for representatives was far from sufficient. “Every day,” he wrote, a citizen must be a “participator in the government of affairs.”
McChesney’s awareness of the constructed nature of media systems also gave him insight into how they could be weakened by — or even enable — authoritarian leaders. “In dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, those in power generate a media system that supports their domination and minimizes the possibility of effective opposition,” he wrote. When Donald Trump made one of his countless threats to sue mainstream media companies over coverage he didn’t like, McChesney — no fan of big media — responded:
…the solution to our problem with news media is not to tie them up in lawsuits, with lots of lawyers and legal fees, and try to intimidate them and shut down news media, what remain of news media. Instead, it’s to broaden it, enrich it, create new voices and fund new voices, so we actually have a diverse marketplace of ideas and we have people who normally are cut out of the picture have an opportunity to participate. And Donald Trump’s view is the exact opposite: It’s either my way or the highway. I think that’s completely outrageous.
Perhaps most notably, McChesney co-founded and for years was president of Free Press, the advocacy group that pushes for net neutrality, public media, press freedom, and other civic-minded improvements to the nation’s news infrastructure. (“McChesney believed in turning ideas into action,” Free Press president Craig Aaron said in a statement this morning. “He believed that people deserve a say in policy decisions that for far too long were made in their name but without their consent. He taught us that the media wasn’t something that just happened to us, but something that we can and must shape and change.”)
The second thing I admired was how engaged he was with the popular audience. It would have been quite easy for a socialist media theorist to remain cloistered in the ivory tower — many manage just fine! — but McChesney was constantly writing and speaking and podcasting about his ideas and the immediacy with which they intersect with the world we live in today. I mean, the guy’s CV was 195 pages long, packed with speeches, essays, and other public scholarship. I will always have a special place in my heart for people with an academic’s chops but a journalist’s desire to reach into the real world, and McChesney was a model for that sort of media scholar.
(He even had a long-running semi-secret life writing about pro basketball under the pseudonym Elrod Enchilada. In extremely McChesney style, he once advocated a sort of socialist centralization of NBA salaries that would better allocate rewards to labor.)
That Bob McChesney was a superfan of the Boston Celtics and the Cleveland Browns shows he knew both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. But it also shows he knew the value of hope — that there’s always next year. His analysis of our media systems could fuel a deep cynicism about the corruption inherent in human institutions. But people should remember him as someone who always maintained the optimism that democracy could find a way to heal its broken infrastructure.
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