{"id":25592,"date":"2025-04-08T20:12:54","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T20:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25592"},"modified":"2025-04-08T20:25:12","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T20:25:12","slug":"robert-w-mcchesney-who-warned-of-corporate-media-control-dies-at-72","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25592","title":{"rendered":"Robert W. McChesney, Who Warned of Corporate Media Control, Dies at 72"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In over a dozen books, he explored the failures of journalism and the internet, blaming capitalism and calling for the nationalization of Facebook and Google.<\/p>\n

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Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72.<\/p>\n

The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Inger Stole, said.<\/p>\n

Professor McChesney was grounded both in academia \u2014 he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities \u2014 and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana\u2019s first single.<\/p>\n

His primary thesis, expressed in more than a dozen books and in scores of articles and interviews, was that corporate-owned news media was overly compliant with the political powers that be and that it restricted the views Americans were exposed to. He further argued that the promise of the internet \u2014 of a Wild West market of opinions \u2014 had been throttled by a few giant owners of online platforms.<\/p>\n

An early book, \u201cRich Media, Poor Democracy\u201d (1999), warned that consolidation in journalism would undermine democratic norms. In perhaps his best-known work, \u201cDigital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy\u201d (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would usher in an open frontier of information sources and invigorate democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead, he showed how the internet was devastating the business model for newspapers, while supplanting civically minded coverage of local government with lowest-common-denominator fluff: celebrity gossip, cat videos and personal naval gazing.<\/p>\n

Professor McChesney blamed capitalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising \u2014 all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism \u2014 are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

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In over a dozen books, he explored the failures of journalism and the internet, blaming capitalism and calling for the nationalization of Facebook and Google.Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72.The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Inger Stole, said.Professor McChesney was grounded both in academia \u2014 he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities \u2014 and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana\u2019s first single.His primary thesis, expressed in more than a dozen books and in scores of articles and interviews, was that corporate-owned news media was overly compliant with the political powers that be and that it restricted the views Americans were exposed to. He further argued that the promise of the internet \u2014 of a Wild West market of opinions \u2014 had been throttled by a few giant owners of online platforms.An early book, \u201cRich Media, Poor Democracy\u201d (1999), warned that consolidation in journalism would undermine democratic norms. In perhaps his best-known work, \u201cDigital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy\u201d (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would usher in an open frontier of information sources and invigorate democracy.Instead, he showed how the internet was devastating the business model for newspapers, while supplanting civically minded coverage of local government with lowest-common-denominator fluff: celebrity gossip, cat videos and personal naval gazing.Professor McChesney blamed capitalism.\u201cThe profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising \u2014 all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism \u2014 are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop,\u201d he wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25594,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25595,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25592\/revisions\/25595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}