Robert McChesney Quotes

Isn't it only appropriate that, in return for the free use of the public spectrum, broadcasters provide something substantial, something that wouldn't otherwise be provided by marketplace competition?

So the system we have in radio and television today is the direct result of government policies that have been made in our name, in the name of the people, on our behalf, but without our informed consent.

Rules designed for the Ma Bell monopoly during the era of rotary phones were a poor fit for the greatest innovation of our time, the Internet.

Even if someone wanted a purely free-market, competitive media system, it would require extensive government regulation to set up those markets. All our largest media companies are based on the grant of explicit government monopoly privileges and licenses, or franchises, or subsidies. The government didn't come in after the system was in place, it built the system in the first place.

The big difference in those days was that in England the Government subsidized TV, in America we work on TV so we can subsidize the Government.

It's not about 'NBC is evil.' It's about that media structure - CBS, ABC, CNN, even some of the smaller operations are now multinationals, with these extraordinarily diverse holdings.

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

What's happened to broadcasting is that broadcasting really used to be... it used to have a very clear public service quotient. And it's more or less now. And it's been lost.

Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.

The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

Any country that wants to lower its mobile phone rates, all they need to do is bring in an aggressive player.

The BBC is a victim of its own independence.

Reclassifying the Internet as a telecommunications service will have dangerous repercussions for years to come.

Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.

Bell Labs was an astonishing place for many decades, though it fell on somewhat hard times during the telecom meltdown some years ago, as its corporate owner had to cope with shrinking markets.

Back then, the excise tax was designed to be a luxury tax for people who owned telephones.

Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That's up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it's because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry.

It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

The BBC will always be attacked by whoever is in government. It is that George Bush thing of 'If you're not with us you are against us.'

We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up single ownership of too many sources of information so that we have a multiplicity of sources.

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and '80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.

I'm not a big fan of a lot of government dollars going into research and development for private enterprises... and you're not going to see the House of Representatives, I'm certain, provide a lot of money for research and development for electric vehicles.

The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up.

There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.