Robert McChesney’s Media Literacy Work Was Prescient — Why Didn’t More People Listen?
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Generally, on April Fool’s Day I try to write a clever, tongue-in-cheek article that allows us to laugh at ourselves. This year, however, there is so little that could be made to feel light and easy. Instead, I’m going to remember the media literacy guru, Robert McChesney, who paved the way for many of us to understand the politics of mainstream communications. McChesney was prescient about the way that new media communications would not, as many people had forecast, undermine or even eliminate the need for authoritarian leaders to rule with impunity.
In fact, McChesney, who died last week at age 72, gained an international reputation for his writing about how corporate control of the media posed a threat to democracy. As a communications scholar, he chronicled the abuse of corporate and political establishments and identified how media structures and policies shape our broader politics and possibilities.
I was part of the first generation to learn about the world through television. My parents shushed me as they tearfully watched Walter Cronkite describe President Kennedy’s assassination on CBS. I was a Vietnam War child who saw images of death and destruction in our living room each night. I sat in front of the television with a group of neighborhood kids and saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Later, I admired televised hippies who protested with their long hair and peace signs.
It was a time of opposites: a popular sitcom, Gilligan’s Island was juxtaposed with Watergate hearings shown live on television. All were wrapped up into a raw entertainment and information mélange.
Eventually, I headed off to the state university and, like so many of my peers, was attracted to media literacy courses. It was there that I was exposed to McChesney’s work, and it became the foundation of my eventual adult career. John Nichols of The Nation says that McChesney’s “research and his insatiable curiosity helped him to see the future more clearly than any scholar of his generation.” He argued that the media should serve citizens rather than corporations, even as a new era of political and societal upheavals surrounded him.
McChesney saw Power as the ultimate corrupter of the establishment, redefining Foucault’s position that the problem of truth and knowledge is how actors use truth claims. He helped us understand that how we know our worlds is reflected by social practice and norms inherent in media.
McChesney wrote nearly three dozen books, analyzing new media in the late 1990s and continuing on into digital communications for the last decade. His (1999) book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, was particularly illuminating for me. McChesney described the new world of communicating — how choices for people to communicate, learn, shop, and entertain themselves on the World Wide Web — had become only a mouse-click away. He opened up to me the contradiction “between a for-profit, highly concentrated, advertised-saturated, corporate media system and the communication requirements of a democratic system.”
The internet was converging with media and telecommunication systems, and he envisioned rightly that the internet would become “under the thumb of the usual corporate suspects.” He knew at that early moment of the internet that we needed “to reform the media system structurally.”
By 2000, McChesney was writing how corporate conglomeratization had intensified further. Media industries were becoming more consolidated. Time Warner, Disney, and other global media conglomerates controlled more domains of the production and distribution of culture than ever before. As he narrated what it meant to have an interest in the political economy of communication, he recognized that we had entered an era of “globalization, technological revolution, and democratization” — all areas in which media would play a central role. But it would not be a new Golden Age, he warned. Instead, he foresaw what would come to pass: commercial media and communication markets would be deregulated to serve corporate interests.
He explained that “radical improvements in communication technologies” would make “global media empires feasible and lucrative in a manner unthinkable in the past.” But there was more to it than just technology, he continued. “The real motor force has been the incessant force for profit that marks capitalism,” and the consolidation of global advertising had become as pronounced as in global media. In both, small firms were getting eaten by medium firms, and medium firms were being swallowed by big firms. (He knew what he was talking about; he had a career in working in journalism before entering academics. He was a sports stringer for UPI and a skilled ad salesman.)
He said that market competition was an oligarchy and was closed off to outsiders. Professional autonomy of journalism would collapse, McChesney predicted, because all public service institutions and values that interfered with maximum profitability would be eliminated. “The global corporate media is politically conservative,” he explained, “because the media giants are the significant beneficiaries of the current social structure, and any upheaval in property or social relations — particularly to the extent that it reduces the power of business — is not in their interest.”
When businessman Donald Trump made one of his countless threats to sue mainstream media companies over coverage he didn’t like, McChesney responded that news media should be broadened and enriched so that new voices would reinforce a diverse marketplace of ideas. He pushed for a media system that could serve people’s needs and sustain democracy.
In the foreword to Foster’s Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, McChesney mused that “with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington,” mainstream media were rationalizing that they could survive his administration. He admired Foster for exposing “Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist” and for revealing Trump’s true essence.
“Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military—all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away.”
McChesney tried to point us in the right direction, adding that “change can’t happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics.” Even with the waters ever warming, he agreed with Foster that “it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people.”
McChesney was frustrated by the blatant overreach now on display in the Washington of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. “Yet he remained undaunted to the end,” Nichols says, “still spinning out fresh ideas for upending corporate control of media, getting big money out of politics, and revitalizing democracy.”
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