Robert W. Mcchesney, an important media critic, who claimed that corporate property was bad for American journalism and that the billionaires of Silicon Valley who dominated the internet was a threat to democracy, died on March 25 at his home in Madison. It was 72.
The reason was that glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Hinger stole.
Professor Mcchesney was so based on academia – a doctorate. In communications and taught at the universities-and in Melanis-in-Card journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle Music Magazine magazine that examined Nirvana’s first single.
His main dissertation, expressed in more than twelve books and in many articles and interviews, was that the media owned by corporate media were overly compatible with the political forces that were and that they limited the views exposed by the Americans. He also claimed that the promise of the internet – a market for Wild West – had been strangled by some giant online platform owners.
An early book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” (1999), warned that the integration of journalism would undermine democratic standards. In perhaps his best -known work, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Converts the Internet against Democracy” (2013), rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would bring to an open border of sources of information and rejuvenate democracy.
Instead, he showed that the internet was devastating the business model for newspapers, while at the same time replacing the coverage of local government with political spirit with a lower audience: gossip of celebrities, cat video and navel staff.
Professor Mcchesney accused capitalism.
“Profit motivation, commercial character, public relations, marketing and advertising – all the decisive features of modern corporate capitalism – are fundamental to any evaluation of the way the internet has developed and is likely to grow,” he wrote.
An unexpected socialist, Professor Mcchesney claimed that the government should give all Americans $ 200 to donate to non -profit news agencies for their choice.
Campaign for the presidential struggles of Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Sanders returned the favor, writing a front to Professor Mcchesney’s book “Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex destroys America” ​​(2013), written with John Nichols.
In an interview with Truthout, a non -profit news website focused on social justice, Professor Mcchesney attacked Mr Sanders’ Sanders in the 2016 presidential championship in Hillary Clinton. CNN and MSNBC, he said, were deeply biased in favor of the “central” candidates representing the status quo.
“One can only imagine how Sanders would make if he had MSNBC coverage similar to what Obama received in 2007-08,” Professor Mcchesney said.
Conservative writer David Horowitz put Professor Mcchesney on a list of the “101 most dangerous academics in America” ​​in 2006, including the “radical” who interrupted US students.
On the other hand, in 2008 the Utne reader was named Professor Mcchesney as one of the “50 visionaries who change your world”.
Professor Mcchesney warned in 2016 that when corporate giants dominate electronic information – at that moment, these giants were Facebook and Google – they have excessive power over what people know the world.
“This is really contradictory to anything close to a free guy and a free society,” he said in an interview with the left -wing news agency “Democracy Now!”
The way to deal with such monopolies was to nationalize them, he said. He proposed a government acquisition that would make the online parties to a quasi -public service, such as the post office.
Professor Mcchesney was also one of the founders, in 2003, of a public interest, Free Press, who opposed the corporate integration of the News Enterprise, which led a national campaign for the neutrality of the network, seeking equal access to the internet for all content producers such as Netfl.
Robert Waterman Mcchesney was born on December 22, 1952, in Cleveland, one of the two sons of Samuel P. Mcchesney Jr., advertising manager this week, a trade union magazine introduced in Sunday’s newspapers and Edna (McCorkle) Mcchesney.
He grew up in the suburb of Shaker Heights Cleveland and watched Pomfret, a preparation school in Connecticut. In 1977, he graduated with a degree from Evergreen State College in Washington, where he studied politics and economics.
In 1979, after working as a sports farmer for UPI and an author at Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly, he became the publisher of Rocket, who mapped the appearance of the Seattle Grunge-Rock scene in the 1980s and 1990s.
Mentally worried, then enrolled at the Postgraduate School at the University of Washington, winning Ph.D. In communications in 1989. For a decade, he taught at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He and his wife, Dr. Stole, who also had Ph.D. In communications, he then moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was Gutgsell, a gifted professor in the communications department.
Professor Mcchesney’s books also include “Will the Last Journalist please get the lights out?” (2011), with Victor Pickard and “Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy” (1997).
In addition to his wife, he survives their daughters, Amy and Lucy Mcchesney. And a brother, Samuel P. Mcchesney III.
In a delayed book, “People are preparing: the struggle against an unemployment economy and a democracy without citizens” (2016), written with Mr. Nichols, Professor Mcchesney argued that artificial intelligence and digital revolution will eliminate many job categories.
“Capitalism, as we know, is very bad for the technological revolution we are beginning to experience,” he said in an interview with the book.
“Our argument is that we have a democracy without citizens today,” he continued. “By this we mean a government system where all the important decisions of the government are made to fit the interests and values ​​of the richest and most powerful Americans and the companies they own.”
