There is little doubt that Robert McChesney's work represents, in 2004, the culmination of radical media analysis in the United States. Tackling the subject from every relevant angle--history, economics, politics, and culture--through his aptly titled THE PROBLEM OF THE MEDIA (Monthly Review, 2004) he has given serious communications and political activists just the right tool to continue their work. His book, and his ascendant presence in our midst, is to be welcome. It could not come at a more critical time.
Neglected by the Left for generations, drastic media reform and the construction of an alternative non-corporate information network is and has always been an urgent strategic task without which no real defense or reconstruction of our badly wounded democracy is possible. Sparking media reform was the main object behind the founding of Cyrano in 1982.
Not that we haven't been warned. For decades the US Left has had the benefit of gifted and courageous voices who tried to draw attention to this glaring omission. Since the late 1960s Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have been talking eloquently about the criminal complicity of the Western media in America's smug but demonstrably outlaw foreign policy. In book after book, in lecture after lecture, while seeking to expose America's imperial arrogance and cynicism they ended up piecing together a complete roadmap to the misleading syntax utilized by the most powerful mass communications ever assembled in history. And right along with them, other uncompromising "indispensable writers" such as Michael Parenti, Alex Cockburn, Richard Ohmann, and the late Herbert Schiller, also stepped forth to furnish the Left with pretty much irrefutable analyses. Taking a different tack, and largely in response to the Right's high-handed hypocrisy in the field of mass communications, and to counter the toxicity, intimidation and confusion generated by well-funded creatures like Reed Irvine and his grotesquely misnomered Accuracy in Media organization, the unflappable Jeff Cohen founded FAIR. Can any of us imagine the media landscape today without FAIR?
Some of these writers had spent substantial time "inside the monster." Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org's central figure, and perhaps one of the most prolific media watchers around, cut his teeth on local TV in Boston prior to becoming an award-winning producer for CNN and ABC. His career today embraces full-time media criticism and political film-making which, thanks in no small measure to Michael Moore, may no longer be regarded as a ticket to oblivion. [A crop of well-made, politically-engaged documentaries have suddenly come to the fore, Outfoxed, and The Corporation, being just two superb examples of what Cyrano hopes will be but the beginning of a new wave of progressive filmmaking.)
Speaking of media and the struggle to transform society in general, a special debt of gratitude is owed to Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and Leo Huberman, the founding editors of Monthly Review, the independent socialist magazine. Founded right in the middle of the "red scare," and ridiculously puny by comparison to the extravagantly funded publications of the Right, MR had the audacity to keep arguing on behalf of truth and a love for justice and democracy (are they ever separable?) through some of the darkest chapters in recent American history. There is not one ounce of hyperbole when we say that, almost single-handedly, they mentored generations of activists. Why, even Albert Einstein thought enough of the publication to grace it with a superb and defiant article (Why Socialism? 1949), which, of course, remains a deeply buried fact in his mainstream biographies. From a purely historical perspective, it's now fitting that McChesney, a member of the MR editorial group, should complete the theoretical work necessitated by this important field.
Our era rests upon a massive paradox. On the one hand, it is an age of dazzling breakthroughs in communication and information technologies. Communication is so intertwined with the economy and culture that our times have been dubbed the Information Age. Sitting high atop this golden web are a handful of enormous media firms-exceeding by a factor of I0 the size of the largest media firms of just fifteen years earlier-that have established global empires and generated massive riches providing news and entertainment to the peoples of the world. Independent of government control, this commercial media juggernaut provides a bounty of choices unimaginable a generation or two ago. And it is finding a welcoming audience. According to one study, the average American consumed a whopping I I.8 hours of media per day in I998, Up over I3 percent in just three years. As the survey director noted, "the sheer amount of media products and messages consumed by the average American adult is staggering and growing." The rise of the Internet has only accentuated the trend. Although some research suggests that the Internet is replacing some of the time people have spent with other media, other research suggests its more important effect is simply to expand the role of media in people's lives. "People are simply spending more time with media," one media executive stated. "They don't appear to have dropped one medium to have picked up another."
On the other hand, our era is increasingly depoliticized; traditional notions of civic and political involvement have shriveled. Elementary understanding of social and political affairs has declined. Turnout for U.S. elections-admittedly not a perfect barometer-has plummeted over the past thirty years. The I998 congressional elections had one of the lowest turnouts of eligible voters in national elections in U.S. history, as just over one-third of the eligible voters turned out on election day. It is, to employ a phrase coined by Robert Entman, "democracy without citizens."
By conventional reasoning, this is nonsensical. A flowering commercial marketplace of ideas, unencumbered by government censorship or regulation, should generate the most stimulating democratic political culture possible. The response comes that the problem lies elsewhere, that "the people" obviously are not interested in politics or civic issues, because, if they were, it would be in the interests of the wealthy media giants to provide them with such fare. There is an element of truth to that reply, but it is hardly a satisfactory response. Virtually all defenses of the commercial media system for the privileges they receive-typically made by the media owners themselves -are based on the notion that the media play an important, perhaps a central, role in providing the institutional basis for having an informed and participating citizenry. If this is, indeed, a democracy without citizens, the media system has much to answer for.
... [T]he media have become a significant antidemocratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, worldwide. The wealthier and more powerful the corporate media giants have become, the poorer the prospects for participatory democracy. I am not arguing that all media are getting wealthier, of course. Some media firms and sectors are faltering and will falter during this turbulent era. But, on balance, the dominant media firms are larger and more influential than ever before, and the media writ large are more important in our social life than ever before. Nor do I believe the media are the sole or primary cause of the decline of democracy, but they are a part of the problem and closely linked to many of the other factors. Behind the lustrous glow of new technologies and electronic jargon, the media system has become increasingly concentrated and conglomerated into a relative handful of corporate hands.
This concentration accentuates the core tendencies of a profit-driven, advertising-supported media system: hypercommercialism and denigration of journalism and public service. It is a poison pill for democracy.
Nor is the decline of democracy in the face of this boom in media wealth a contradiction. The media system is linked ever more closely to the capitalist system, both through ownership and through its reliance upon advertising, a function dominated by the largest firms in the economy. Capitalism benefits from having a formally democratic system, but capitalism works best when elites make most fundamental decisions and the bulk of the population is depoliticized. For a variety of reasons, the media have come to be expert at generating the type of fare that suits, and perpetuates, the status quo. ... if we value democracy, it is imperative that we restructure the media system so that it reconnects with the mass of citizens who in fact comprise "democracy." ... media reform ... can take place only if it is part of a broader political movement to shift power from the few to the many. Conversely, any meaningful attempt ... to democratize the United States, or any other society, must make media reform a part (though by no means all) of its agenda. Such has not been the case heretofore.
This book, then, is about the corporate media explosion and the corresponding implosion of public life, the rich media/poor democracy paradox. Its purpose is to analyze the existing situation by drawing upon history and pointing toward democratic change in the future. As such, this book goes directly counter to the prevailing wisdom of our times: The ultimate trump card of conservatism and reaction, after all their other arguments have been discredited, is that there is no possibility of social change for the better, so it is a notion not even worth pondering, let alone pursuing. This card has been played by ruling elites since the dawn of civilization, but never has it been waved more ferociously than at the close of the twentieth century. It has deadened social thought and has demoralized social movements and public life. And it is a lie, the biggest lie of them all. The world is changing rapidly and is doing so because of decisions made by actors working within a specific social system. If anything, humans now possess greater ability to alter their destiny than ever before. Those who benefit by the status quo know this well. They want to ensure that they are the ones holding the reins; they want everyone else to accept their privileges as "natural" and immutable.
... [T]he duty of the democrat, and especially of the democratic intellectual, is to rip the veil off this power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.
...[T]he term democracy. One of the heartening features of our age is that the term is embraced by nearly all but a handful of bigots, fanatics, and xenophobes. This is a relatively recent development, and its newfound popularity is a reminder of how far humanity has traveled over the past few centuries. But the term is employed so widely that it has lost much of its specificity and meaning. Hence a product that is consumed widely is termed a "democratic" product, as opposed to a product consumed by the few. Indeed, the term "democratic" is seemingly applied to describe anything or any behavior that is good, while words like "fascist" or "Hitler-like" are used to describe negative behavior, regardless of any actual relationship to the Third Reich or fascist politics, or politics at all.
So it is that when the United States is characterized as a democratic society, what is meant varies considerably with the assumptions and values of the person making the claim. If we may generalize, however, when the United States is characterized as a democracy, this is meant to suggest that in the United States the citizens enjoy individual rights and freedoms, including the right to vote in elections, and that arbitrary government power is held in check by a constitution and laws and a legal system that enforces them. What is conspicuously absent from notions of the United States as a democracy is anything that has much to do with democracy, the idea that the many should and do make the core political decisions. In fact, very few people would argue that the United States is remotely close to a democratic society in that sense of the term. Many key decisions are the province of the corporate sector and most decisions made by the government are influenced by powerful special interests with little public awareness or input.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out in brilliant fashion, what is called democracy in the United States and, increasingly, around the world is better thought of as liberalism. As Wood notes, liberalism developed in Europe in the movement to protect the rights of feudal lords from monarchs. Later, with the rise of capitalism, liberalism became an important set of principles to protect, among other things, private property from the state, especially a state that might be controlled by the propertyless majority. In the United States today, therefore, some go so far as to present democracy as being defined first and foremost by individual freedoms to buy and sell property and the right to invest for profit. That there is any distinction between these liberties and the democratic rights to free speech, free press, and free assembly is dismissed categorically. The absurdity of this equation of market rights with political freedom, of capitalism with democracy, should be self-evident; in this century scores of nations have protected market rights while being political dictatorships and having little respect for any other civil liberties for that matter.
There is very much that is commendable in liberalism-and it is impossible to imagine a democratic society without core liberal freedoms-but the fact remains that it is different from democracy. When democracy is defined as liberalism, the notion of popular rule, rather than being the heart and soul of democracy, drifts to the margins. In contemporary U.S. society, citizens have precious little control over political decisions. In strict terms, what distinguishes the United States from a political oligarchy is that citizens do retain the right to vote in elections and thereby remove politicians from office, even if they have little control over what politicians actually do while in office. Since the elections are rather dubious enterprises-they are more like auctions favoring those with great sums of money, the campaign debate almost always avoids wide-ranging debate on the core issues, and the choices on the ballot are mostly inconsequential to the important decisions to be made after the election-even this democratic right to vote seems trivial. Yet in dominant thinking the existence of this right to vote is what qualifies the United States as a democracy. It is an awfully, awfully thin reed.
When I invoke the term democracy, then, I mean it in the classical sense, as the rule of the many. The democratic aspects of the liberal tradition are to be preserved and expanded-such as individual civil liberties and checks on state power-but the needs of the minuscule investor class can never be equated with the needs of the citizenry or with the foundations of a democracy. A society like the United States which has rampant inequality, minimal popular involvement in decision making, and widespread depoliticization can never be regarded as democratic in an honest use of the term. When I talk about "democratizing" our society, I mean that we should create mechanisms that make the rule of the many possible. This means among other things ... reducing social inequality and establishing a media system that serves the entire population and that promotes democratic rule. In structural terms, that means a media system that has a significant nonprofit and noncommercial component.
...[T]he rise of neoliberalism is a main factor that accounts for the corporate media boom, on the one hand, and the collapse of democratic political life on the other hand. Neoliberalism refers to the policies that maximize the role of markets and profit-making and minimize the role of nonmarket institutions. It is the deregulation provided by neoliberalism that has been instrumental in allowing the wealthy media corporations to grow and prosper as they have. Likewise, neoliberalism is a political theory; it posits that society works best when business runs things and there is as little possibility of government "interference" with business as possible. In short, neoliberal democracy is one where the political sector controls little and debates even less. In such a world political apathy and indifference are a quite rational choice for the bulk of the citizenry, especially for those who reside below the upper and upper-middle classes.
Neoliberalism is associated with the rise of Reagan and Thatcher in the early I980s, and it has boomed as a global phenomenon throughout the past two decades. But it would be misleading to present neoliberalism as an entirely new phenomenon. In fact the desire by the wealthy-few to limit democracy predates capitalism, and has been present throughout U.S. history. At the time of the American Revolution, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin advocated universal adult male suffrage. Their opponents, John Adams, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, fought to see suffrage limited to property holders and the government structured in such a manner as to reduce the possibility of popular rule. Jay and Adams counted as one of their favorite expressions "those who own this country ought to govern it." During the constitutional debates James Madison argued that the goal of government must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." In short, the nature and quality of democracy is always the result of conflict and struggle between contending groups in unequal societies. Neoliberalism mostly reflects that the few are dominant politically and ideologically and able therefore to inflict their will on the subdued and unorganized population.
The media/democracy paradox ... has two components. First, it is a political crisis. I mean this in two senses. On the one hand, the nature of our corporate commercial media system has dire implications for our politics and broader culture. On the other hand, the very issue of who controls the media system and for what purposes is not a part of contemporary political debate. Instead, there is the presupposition that a profit-seeking, commercial media system is fundamentally sound, and that most problems can be resolved for the most part through less state interference or regulation, which (theoretically) will produce the magic elixir of competition. In view of the extraordinary importance of media and communication in our society, I believe that the subject of how the media are controlled, structured, and subsidized should be at the center of democratic debate. Instead, this subject is nowhere to be found. This is not an accident; it reflects above all the economic, political, and ideological power of the media corporations and their allies. And it has made the prospect of challenging corporate media power, and of democratizing communication, all the more daunting.
The second component of the media/democracy paradox concerns media ideology, in particular the flawed and self-serving manner in which corporate media officers and their supporters use history. The nature of our corporate media system and the lack of democratic debate over the nature of our media system are often defended on the following grounds: that communication markets force media firms to "give the people what they want"; that commercial media are the innate democratic and "American" system; that professionalism in journalism is democratic and protects the public from nefarious influences on the news; that new communication technologies are inherently democratic since they undermine the existing power of commercial media; and, perhaps most important, that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution authorizes that corporations and advertisers rule U.S. media without public interference. These are generally presented as truisms, and nearly always history is invoked to provide evidence for each of these claims. In combination these claims have considerable sway in the United States, even among those who are critical of the social order otherwise. ... these myths, which are either lies or half-truths, ... [can] strip citizens of their ability to comprehend their own situation and govern their own lives ...
ROBERT W. McCHESNEY, a research associate professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is also the author of Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-35 and other books on media, including his latest, The Problem of the Media (MR, 2004)
Rich Media, Poor Democracy
ON THE BOOK ITSELF: The first paperback edition of a myth-breaking book on media, from one of today's most reputable and insightful media historian/critics. Winner of Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize, Rich Media, Poor Democracy challenges the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information "choices" is a democratic one. Robert McChesney, whom Marc Crispin Miller calls "the greatest of our media historians," argues that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are wealthy investors, advertisers, and a handful of enormous media, computer, and telecommunications corporations. This concentrated corporate control, McChesney maintains, is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy. Combining unprecedented detail on current events with historical sweep, in a book Noam Chomsky calls a "rich and penetrating study," McChesney chronicles the waves of media mergers and acquisitions in the late 1990s. He reviews the corrupt and secretive enactment of public policies surrounding the internet, digital television, and public broadcasting. He also addresses the gradual and ominous adaptation of the First Amendment as a means of shielding corporate media power and the wealthy, and he debunks the myth that the market compels media firms to "give the people what they want." In an eye-opening call to action, McChesney warns that we must organize politically to restructure the media if we want democracy to endure.
