Robert McChesney Quotes
In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants.
McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was echoing criticisms that were made the world over and even by some in the United States. However, his solution to have the press controlled by the ruling party just changed the cast of characters who were propagandizing and distorting the truth. Lenin was not able to offer a better solution nor were others. However, with enough affluence the capitalist society produced enough different publishers all competing that one did not dominate public opinion. With technology of TV and the Internet, the bar to entry is so small that almost anyone can be a publisher and find an interested market. In a way technology has solved much of the problem for capitalistic and totalitarian societies alike. In the latter, even censorship is not easy or feasible on a large scale.
Note the difference in standards that existed at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wall Street Journal was offended because corporations had paid agents in labor unions, legislatures and political parties. A century later it was common for corporations to have many lobbyists (overt and covert) in legislatures,. They had key representatives in political parties and gave the parties huge fiscal and service contributions and not only had their paid agents in labor unions but often sometimes paid the officers of the unions. The morality of 1904 seems almost quaint.
Otehr members of the Trump staff then started to echo the notion and it became common in Trumpian circles.
Robert Waterman McChesney is an American professor notable in the history and political economy of communications, and the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies. He is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He co-founded the Free Press, a national media reform organization. From 2002–12, he hosted Media Matters, a weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL (AM), Illinois Public Media radio.
