Bob McChesney was a media thinker whose idealism could have led to a better world

Earlier this morning I looked up a review that I wrote for The Boston Phoenix of Robert McChesney’s breakthrough 1999 book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy.” I had to laugh, because Bob was right and I was wrong, and for a reason I wouldn’t have expected. Over the years I had come to regard myself as more realistic than progressive media reformers like Bob, whose fertile mind produced all sorts of idealistic proposals for improving the media. In this case, though, he was the realistic one.

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Bob McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a leading progressive thinker in media-reform circles, died last Tuesday at 72. His friend and longtime collaborator John Nichols has a moving remembrance in The Nation, writing:

As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.

To get back to that review: In the Oct. 1, 1999, edition of the Phoenix, I wrote about two important books about the media by then-rising scholars. Jay Rosen of New York University had just published “What Are Journalists For?,” an exploration of his involvement in the public journalism movement, which sought to involve citizen as collaborators in how the media cover their communities. McChesney’s book examined the effects of monopolistic corporate control of the news media, building on the earlier work of Ben Bagdikian, author of the oft-updated “The Media Monopoly.”

My review of Rosen’s and McChesney’s books was largely favorable, but I thought McChesney was overly pessimistic about the internet. He predicted the internet would fall into the hands of corporate interests, following the path of earlier technologies. I wrote:

But McChesney undermines himself with his willfully dismissive view of the Internet, which could counteract many of the evils he convincingly describes. McChesney argues that, to date, the Internet has followed the same same path as the early days of radio, with nonprofit and amateur projects slowly giving way to the forces of commercialism. But in radio, the public was shut out by a deliberate act of government, in league with the fledgling broadcasting industry. That’s simply not going to happen with the Internet, because the guise under which nonprofit radio was killed — a limited broadcast spectrum that required government regulation — simply doesn’t exist on the Net. Thus, a theoretically infinite number of nonprofit projects can exist simultaneously with the forces of commercialism. McChesney acknowledges all this, yet dismisses its importance, questioning the impact, say, of an obscure leftist Web site amid a sea of entertainment and shopping sites. But of course webmasters can band together in all kinds of creative ways to increase their visibility. A portal of progressive Web projects under the banner of The Nation, for example, could have a considerable impact. McChesney’s discussion of the Net seems churlish, as if he’s afraid that technology will undermine his call for an anti-corporate jihad.

McChesney, needless to say, turned out to be exactly right, as the rise of giant social media platforms did indeed overwhelm the nascent democratic media that thrived in the early days of the web. It’s not that grassroots projects ceased to exist; rather, it’s that they have an extraordinarily difficult time getting heard over Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and their ilk, all of which are, as McChesney warned, devoted to entertainment and shopping. (Interestingly, we’re in the midst of a slight rebound at the moment, as newsletter platforms such as Substack and Beehiiv are fueling a number of independent projects, some of which have managed to get themselves heard above the din.)

As Republican and Democratic administrations alike paved the way for corporate entities to acquire more and more media outlets, another idea of Bob’s entered into my thinking: the notion that “deregulation” is a misnomer. What we think of as “regulation” is pro-consumer, and what we think of as “deregulation” is just another type of regulation, except that it’s carried out on behalf of corporate interests.

It’s too late now, but think back to the “deregulation” of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which (among many other things) removed meaningful ownership caps for radio stations. The law, eagerly embraced by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, ended up destroying commercial radio, which in turn paved the way for a flowering of public radio. Of course, that’s now under threat, too, as the Trump White House seeks to eliminate all funding for public media.

In 2010, I hosted McChesney and Nichols when they came to Northeastern to talk about their book “The Death and Life of American Journalism,” in which they proposed $30 billion a year in government subsidies for journalism. Bob was still at it in 2021, calling for $32 billion to $35 billion to be distributed to media projects every year over a five-year period, disbursed by democratically elected local citizens’ boards. As I wrote at the time, “It’s pretty breath-taking, and McChesney admits there’s no support for such a plan in Washington at the moment. But the value McChesney has always brought to the table is that he thinks big and gives us a chance to wrap our minds around larger possibilities.”

Bob’s call for large-scale media reform has been taken up by Free Press, the Northampton-based organization he helped found, and by a new generation of scholars like Victor Pickard.

The conundrum that Bob McChesney’s ideas have always posed is that, on the one hand, they seem wildly unrealistic (to use that word again) — but on the other, we now find ourselves in the midst of a crisis of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, much of it driven by a very different kind of media environment fueled by the likes of Fox News and tech platforms run wild.

Bob’s North Star has always been a better society served by truly democratic media. The shame of it isn’t that his ideas were unrealistic. It’s that they were dismissed as unrealistic by those who stood to benefit from corporate power.