Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel, January 27, 2008
By Stephen Lendman

Robert McChesney is a leading media scholar, critic, activist, and the nation's most prominent researcher and writer on US media history, its policy and practice. He's also University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In addition, he co-founded (with Dan Schiller) the Illinois Initiative on Global Information and Communication Policy in 2002, hosts a popular weekly radio program called Media Matters on WILL-AM radio, and is the co-founder in 2002 and president of the growing Free Press media reform advocacy organization.

Free Press recognizes that the "current media system is the result of explicit government policies" that special interests representing private investors secretly drafted for themselves. It wants change to democratize the media and increase public participation in it. Toward that end, it seeks to be a "proactive force to advance meaningful media policy in the public interest" and is doing it through a range of vital initiatives. They include challenging media concentration, protecting net neutrality, and since 2003 hosting an annual national conference for media reform that brings together scholars, journalists, activists, policymakers and concerned citizens to discuss and highlight media reform issues and action strategies.

McChesney's work "concentrates on the history and political economy of communication (by) emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies" where the primary goal is profits, not the public interest. He's also a frequent speaker, contributor to many publications, and the author or editor of 16 books, including Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, the award-winning Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, and the one he says had the "greatest impact of anything I have written," Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

His newest book and subject of this review is titled Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. He believes it may be his best one, and Annenberg School of Communication Dean, Machael Delli Carpini, says it is "part media critique, part intellectual history, part personal memoir, and part manifesto."

McChesney's premise is we have "an unprecendented (rare window of opportunity in the next decade or two) to create a communication system that will be a powerful impetus (for) a more egalitarian, humane, sustainable, and creative (self-governing) society." He calls it a "critical juncture" that won't remain open for long. It offers a "historic moment" in a "fight we cannot afford to lose." The stakes for a free society are that high, and stacked against the public interest are powerful forces determined to prevail with friends in high places supporting them.

Nonetheless, McChesney believes "the corporate stranglehold over our media system is very much in jeopardy," citizen actions have successfully challenged them, and in the past three years have won important victories on ownership rules, protecting public broadcasting and standing up to "government and corporate propaganda masquerading as (real) news" and information. However, the most important battle lies ahead-preserving net neutrality and keeping the internet free, open and out of corporate hands.

McChesney notes that the media reform movement has entered a new phase that can democratize the system if citizen actions prevail. It offers the potential for:

* uncensored wired and wireless "super-fast ubiquitous broadband;"
* competitive commercial media markets through new ownership policies;
* a government-supported viable noncommercial and non-profit media;
* media that informs citizens about candidates in place of corporate-paid advertising that slants information about them for private interests; and
* limiting commercialism in media content and ending its influence on children through advertising.

This and more is possible at this "critical juncture" where an "ancien regime" is passing, and it's up to public activism to decide what replaces it-if we recognize the opportunity and seize it. To understand the communication revolution, McChesney believes "the field of communication (must) fundamentally rethink its past, present and future." He directs his book to scholars, teachers, students and activists but also to concerned citizens because we're all part of the same struggle that affects everyone.

Who better to lead it than the nation's foremost media scholar and teacher who's spent 25 years in the communications field and is helping to remake it. He reflected on what role he should play and decided his own research is "central to (his) argument," and more importantly, his long "association with media policy activism." He further believes if the communication field doesn't take advantage of this "critical juncture," he "fear(s) not only for the future of the field," but also for the republic now on life support at best.
Crisis in Communication, Crisis for Society

McChesney stresses we're now "in the midst of a communication and information revolution" that will either turn out glorious, a rare window of opportunity lost, or something in between. Crucial policy decisions taken over the next one or two decades will decide how things turn out with the public very much a player in the process. In the past decade, there's been "an unprecedented increase in popular concern about media policies" that are now "everybody's business."

Communication is "central to democratic theory and practice" with new technologies becoming society's "central nervous system" in ways previously unimaginable. McChesney states the opportunity powerfully: "No previous communication revolution (has had as much) promise (to let) us radically transcend the structural communication limitations for effective self-government and human happiness (in) human history." But only if organized people take on organized money to make it happen, and their challenge is daunting considering the opposition.

Scholars are needed as well, but since the mid-1980s communication has settled for a "second-tier role in US academic life." It's been undistinguished by too little research even though there are scores of dedicated people in the field. McChesney believes there's a "gaping chasm between the role of the media and communication in our society," and it's reached a crisis stage. His solution: engaged scholarship on the issues because what happens in academia affects everyone.

A digital revolution is unfolding that will touch all aspects of our lives

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