Robert W. McChesney, a left-leaning media critic who argued 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.
He was grounded both in academia, with a Ph.D. in communications, and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine.
His primary thesis 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 argued the promise of the internet was throttled by a few giant owners of online platforms.
He warned that consolidation in journalism would undermine democratic norms and that the digital revolution was devastating the business model for newspapers, while supplanting civically minded coverage of local government with lowest-common-denominator fluff.
Professor McChesney blamed capitalism and argued that the government should give all Americans $200 vouchers to donate to nonprofit news outlets of their choice.
He campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential races. Mr. Sanders returned the favor by writing a forward to Professor McChesney’s book “Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America” (2013), written with John Nichols.
Professor McChesney interviewed with Truthout and attacked the mainstream media’s coverage of Mr. Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary that he lost to Hillary Clinton. CNN and MSNBC were deeply biased in favor of “centrist” candidates representing the status quo.
Professor McChesney warned that when corporate giants dominate online information they hold too much power over what people know of the world. He suggested a government takeover that would make internet behemoths into a quasi-public service, like the Post Office.
He was also one of the founders of a public interest group, Free Press, that opposed corporate consolidation in the news business and led a national campaign for net neutrality.
Robert Waterman McChesney was born on Dec. 22, 1952, in Cleveland, one of two sons of Samuel P. McChesney Jr. He grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights and attended Pomfret, a prep school in Connecticut.
In 2016, he argued that artificial intelligence and the digital revolution would wipe out numerous categories of jobs. “Capitalism as we know it is a very bad fit for the technological revolution we are beginning to experience,” he said.
In his last book, “People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy” (2016), Professor McChesney argued that we currently have a citizenless democracy, a governing system where all the important decisions of government are made to suit the interests and values of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans, and the corporations they own.
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