Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Founder of the “media reform” organization Free Press
Former co-editor of the Marxist journal Monthly Review and a current Director of the tax-exempt Monthly Review Foundation
Board member of the Institute for Public Accuracy
Robert McChesney is the founder of the “media reform” organization Free Press, and a board member of Norman Solomon's Institute for Public Accuracy. He is also a former editor and current board member of the Marxist magazine Monthly Review, which has a fifty-year history of supporting Communist movements and regimes.
In 1977 McChesney graduated with a B.A. in economics and history from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. From 1977 to 1979 he worked as Seattle circulation coordinator for the socialist weekly In These Times and as editor of 30 Day Notice, the bi-monthly newsletter of the Seattle Tenants Union.
In 1979 McChesney became a sports stringer for the wire service United Press International (UPI). He also became publisher and president of two new publications. One was the short-lived counter-cultural newspaper The Seattle Sun. The other, which he founded, was the music and pop culture magazine The Rocket.
In 1986 McChesney earned a Master's Degree in Communications from the University of Washington, and in 1989 he completed a Ph.D. there with a dissertation titled, “The Battle for America’s Ears and Minds: The Debate Over the Control and Structure of American Radio Broadcasting, 1930-1935.”
From 1988 until 1998 McChesney taught journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became friends with local radical journalist John Nichols, now Washington Correspondent for The Nation magazine. McChesney has co-authored three books with Nichols: It’s the Media, Stupid!; Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media; and Tragedy & Farce: How Media Warps Elections and Democracy.
In 1999 McChesney was hired as Research Associate Professor at the Institute of Communications Research, Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was also appointed as Senior Research Scientist at the school’s National Center for Supercomputer Applications. In 2000 he was promoted to Research Professor.
In 2001 McChesney became co-editor (with John Bellamy Foster) of Monthly Review. In 2004 McChesney ceased to be an editor, but he continues to write for Monthly Review and is a director of its tax-exempt Monthly Review Foundation,whichoperates both the journal and its book-publishing arm, Monthly Review Press.
Since 2002 McChesney has hosted his own Sunday radio show, Media Matters, on WILL radio, the campus affiliate of National Public Radio. His guest list there and on another program he hosted from 1995-1999 on the Madison, Wisconsin radio station WORT-FM reads like a "Who’s Who" of the extreme left. Guests have included Barbara Ehrenreich, Z Magazine editor Michael Albert, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting founder Jeff Cohen, CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn, The Progressivemagazine editor Matthew Rothschild, editorial cartoonist Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins), and Marxist professor Howard Zinn.
Blaming the media for having “helped anoint a president” in 2000, McChesney refers to President Bush as “the moronic child of privilege.” Wrote McChesney in the spring of 2003:
“[C]onsider the manner in which the press reported President Bush’s ‘victory’ in the 2000 election. It is now clear that the majority of the people in Florida who went to vote for president in November 2000 intended to vote for Al Gore. . . . But Al Gore isn’t president. Why is that? Or to put it another way, why didn’t the press coverage assure that the true winner would assume office? . . . The primary reason is due to sourcing: throughout November and early December of 2000, the news media were being told by all Republicans that the Republicans had won the election and Al Gore was trying to steal it. The Democrats, on the other hand, were far less antagonistic and showed much less enthusiasm to fight for what they had won. Hence the news coverage, reflecting what their sources were telling them, tended to reflect the idea that the Republicans had won and the Democrats were grasping for straws. . . . Once the Supreme Court made its final decision, the media were elated to announce that our national nightmare was over.”
Elaborating further on this theme, McChesney wrote: “No one should be surprised by the polls showing that close to 90 percent of Americans are satisfied with the performance of their selected President, or that close to 80 percent of the citizenry applaud his Administration’s seat-of-the-pants management of an undeclared war. After all, most Americans get their information from media that have pledged to give the American people only the President’s side of the story.”
The foregoing analysis was made just after a short, almost casualty-free, successful war in Iraq. When consolidating victory proved more difficult and a domestic opposition developed, the President’s poll numbers fell dramatically and media coverage of his administration was overwhelmingly negative. Yet McChesney did not retract his earlier assertions.
In Professor McChesney’s view, the American media are largely shills for conservatives and the Bush administration, and willing abettors of his unjust wars. As he wrote in 2003:
“What is most striking in the U.S. news coverage following the September 11 attacks of 2001 is how . . . the very debate over whether to go to war, or how best to respond, did not even exist. Tough questions were ignored. Why should we believe that a militarized approach will be effective? Moving beyond the 9-11 attacks, why should the United States be entitled to determine -- as judge, jury, and executioner -- who is a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer in this global war? What about international law? Most conspicuous was the complete absence of comment on one of the most striking features of the war campaign, something that any credible journalist would be quick to observe: . . . There are very powerful interests in the United States who greatly benefit politically and economically by the establishment of an unchecked war on terrorism. This consortium of interests can be called . . . the military-industrial complex. It blossomed during the Cold War when the fear of Soviet imperialism -- real or alleged -- justified its creation and expansion. A nation with a historically small military now had a permanent war economy, and powerful special interests benefited by its existence.”
In addition to the books he co-authored with John Nichols, McChesney has also penned the following titles: Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (1993); Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (1997); The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (co-authored with Edward Herman, 1997); Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (1999); and The Big Picture: Understanding Media Through Political Economy (co-authored with John Bellamy Foster, 2003). McChesney also co-edited (with Ben Scott) the 2004 book Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism.
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