Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that company possession was unhealthy for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated on-line data have been a menace to democracy, died on March 25, at his house in Madison, Wis. He was 72.
The trigger was glioblastoma, an aggressive mind most cancers, his spouse, Inger Stole, mentioned.
Professor McChesney was grounded each in academia — he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities — and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding writer of The Rocket, a Seattle music journal that reviewed Nirvana’s first single.
His major thesis, expressed in additional than a dozen books and in scores of articles and interviews, was that corporate-owned information media was overly compliant with the political powers that be and that it restricted the views Individuals have been uncovered to. He additional argued that the promise of the web — of a Wild West market of opinions — had been throttled by just a few large homeowners of on-line platforms.
An early e book, “Wealthy Media, Poor Democracy” (1999), warned that consolidation in journalism would undermine democratic norms. In maybe his best-known work, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Web In opposition to Democracy” (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would usher in an open frontier of knowledge sources and invigorate democracy.
As an alternative, he confirmed how the web was devastating the enterprise mannequin for newspapers, whereas supplanting civically minded protection of native authorities with lowest-common-denominator fluff: celeb gossip, cat movies and private navel gazing.
Professor McChesney blamed capitalism.
“The revenue motive, commercialism, public relations, advertising, and promoting — all defining options of latest company capitalism — are foundational to any evaluation of how the Web has developed and is more likely to develop,” he wrote.
An unapologetic socialist, Professor McChesney argued that the federal government ought to give all Individuals $200 vouchers to donate to nonprofit information retailers of their selection.
He campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential races. Mr. Sanders returned the favor by writing a ahead to Professor McChesney’s e book “Dollarocracy: How the Cash and Media Election Advanced Is Destroying America” (2013), written with John Nichols.
In an interview with Truthout, a nonprofit information web site centered on social justice, Professor McChesney attacked the mainstream media’s protection of Mr. Sanders within the 2016 presidential major that he misplaced to Hillary Clinton. CNN and MSNBC, he mentioned, have been deeply biased in favor of “centrist” candidates representing the established order.
“One can solely think about how Sanders would have achieved if he had protection from MSNBC much like what Obama obtained in 2007-08,” Professor McChesney mentioned.
The conservative author David Horowitz put Professor McChesney on a listing of the “101 Most Harmful Teachers in America” in 2006, together with him amongst “tenured radicals” who have been indoctrinating U.S. college students.
Alternatively, in 2008 Utne Reader named Professor McChesney as one of many “50 Visionaries Who Are Altering Your World.”
Professor McChesney warned in 2016 that when company giants dominate on-line data — on the time, these giants have been Fb and Google — they maintain an excessive amount of energy over what individuals know of the world.
“That is actually antithetical to something remotely near a free press and a free society,” he said in an interview with the left-leaning information outlet “Democracy Now!”
The best way to take care of such monopolies was to nationalize them, he mentioned. He recommended a authorities takeover that might make web behemoths right into a quasi-public service, just like the Submit Workplace.
Professor McChesney was additionally one of many founders, in 2003, of a public curiosity group, Free Press, that opposed company consolidation within the information enterprise and that led a nationwide marketing campaign for internet neutrality, calling for equal entry to the web for all content material producers, from giants like Netflix to particular person bloggers.
Robert Waterman McChesney was born on Dec. 22, 1952, in Cleveland, one in every of two sons of Samuel P. McChesney Jr., an promoting govt at This Week, a syndicated journal inserted in Sunday newspapers, and Edna (McCorkle) McChesney.
He grew up within the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights and attended Pomfret, a prep faculty in Connecticut. In 1977, he graduated with a bachelor’s diploma from Evergreen State Faculty, in Washington, the place he studied politics and economics.
In 1979, after working as a sports activities stringer for U.P.I. and an editor at The Seattle Solar, an alternate weekly, he turned the writer of The Rocket, which charted the emergence of the Seattle grunge-rock scene within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s.
Intellectually stressed, he then enrolled in graduate faculty on the College of Washington, incomes a Ph.D. in communications in 1989. For a decade, he taught within the journalism and mass communication division on the College of Wisconsin-Madison.
He and his spouse, Dr. Stole, who additionally had a Ph.D. in communications, then moved to the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the place he was the Gutgsell Endowed Professor within the communications division.
Professor McChesney’s books additionally embrace “Will the Final Reporter Please Flip Out the Lights?” (2011), with Victor Pickard, and “Company Media and the Risk to Democracy” (1997).
Along with his spouse, he’s survived by their daughters, Amy and Lucy McChesney; and a brother, Samuel P. McChesney III.
In a late e book, “Individuals Get Prepared: The Struggle In opposition to a Jobless Financial system and a Citizenless Democracy” (2016), written with Mr. Nichols, Professor McChesney argued that synthetic intelligence and the digital revolution would wipe out quite a few classes of jobs.
“Capitalism as we all know it’s a very unhealthy match for the technological revolution we’re starting to expertise,” he mentioned in an interview concerning the e book.
“Our argument is that we at the moment have a citizenless democracy,” he went on. “By that we imply a governing system the place all of the essential choices of presidency are made to go well with the pursuits and values of the wealthiest and strongest Individuals, and the firms they personal.”
