Robert W. McShesney, an influential, left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that the Silicon Valley billionaire who dominated online information was a threat to democracy, died on March 25th at his home in Madison, Wisconsin.
The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, said his wife, Inger, stole it.
Both Professor McChesney were grounded in academia. He had a PhD. I'm taught communication and at university. And Ink-On Paper Journalism: He was the founder of Rocket, the Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana's first single.
His major papers were expressed in more than a dozen books and numerous articles and interviews, but the corporate-owned news media was overly compliant with a certain political force, limiting the views that Americans were exposed to. He further argued that the internet (the promise of the wild west market of opinion) was squeezed by some huge owners of online platforms.
An early book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999) warned that the integration of journalism undermines democratic norms. Perhaps his most famous work, “Digital Cutting: How Capitalism Does the Internet Against Democracy” (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would arrive at the public frontier of sources and stimulate democracy.
Instead, he shows how the internet is destroying the business model of newspapers, while local government civilly hearted coverage features the lowest common denominator fluff, celebrity gossip, cat videos and personal naval gaze.
Professor McChesney condemned capitalism.
“Profit motivation, commercialism, public relations, marketing, advertising – all the critical features of modern corporate capitalism – are the basis for an assessment of how the Internet can develop and potentially develop,” he writes.
A compelling socialist, Professor McChesney argued that the government should provide a $200 voucher to all Americans and donate to the non-profit news outlet of their choice.
He campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential election. Sanders replied his favor by writing forward in Professor McKeesney's book, “Dollarrocracy: How the Money and Media election complex is destroying America” (2013), written by John Nichols.
In an interview with Truthout, a nonprofit news site focusing on social justice, Professor McChesney attacked mainstream media Sanders' reporting in the 2016 presidential primary, which was defeated by Hillary Clinton. He said CNN and MSNBC are deeply biased in favor of “centristic” candidates representing the status quo.
“Like what Obama received between 2007 and 2008, you could only imagine if Sanders received reports from MSNBC,” Professor McChesney said.
Conservative author David Horowitz featured Professor Macchesney on his 2006 list of “101 Most Dangerous Scholars in America.”
Meanwhile, in 2008, Utne Reader nominated Professor McChesney as one of the “50 Foresights That Are Changing Your World.”
Professor McChesney warned in 2016 when corporate giants were dominating online information (at the time, those giants were Facebook and Google).
“This is truly inconsistent with something far apart from free press and free society,” he said in an interview with the left-leaning news outlet Democracy Now!
The way to deal with such monopolies was to nationalize them, he said. He proposed a government takeover that would make the internet giant a semi-public service, like the post office.
Professor McChesney was one of the founders of the public interest group Free Press in 2003, opposed the merger of the news business and called for equal access to the internet for all content producers, from giants like Netflix to individual bloggers.
Robert Waterman McChesney was born in Cleveland on December 22, 1952. In Cleveland, two sons of this week's advertising executive Samuel P. Macchesney Jr., the Syndicate Magazine and Edna (McCorcle) Macchesney, inserted into Sunday's newspaper.
He grew up outside of Cleveland in Shaker Heights and attended Pomflett, a Connecticut prep school. In 1977 he graduated with a bachelor's degree from Evergreen State University in Washington, where he studied politics and economics.
In 1979, after working as an editor for the OPI sports stringer and Seattle Sun, he became the publisher of Rocket, and announced the emergence of the Seattle grunge rock scene in the 1980s and 90s.
Intellectually restless, he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Washington and earned his PhD. In 1989 Communications, he taught for ten years in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He and his wife, Dr. Stoll, also had a Ph.D. In communication, he later moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University, where he was a awarded professor in Gutzel in the Department of Communications.
Professor McChesney's book also includes “The Last Reporter Please Turn Off the Lights.” (2011), Victor Pickard, and “The Threat to Corporate Media and Democracy” (1997).
In addition to his wife, he was survived by his daughters Amy and Lucy McSchesney. brother, Samuel P. Macchesny III;
A later book, People Get Get Ready: The Fight the Fight farts the Fight -a Citizenless Democracy (2016) (2016), with Professor McChesney, written by Mr. Nichols, argued that artificial intelligence and the digital revolution wiped out many categories of work.
“Like we know that capitalism is a very bad thing for the technological revolution we are beginning to go through,” he said in an interview with the book.
“Our point is that we currently have a democracy without citizens,” he continued. “It means the management system where all important government decisions are made to match the profits and values of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans, and the companies they own.”
