Robert Waterman McChesney Quotes

In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times.

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.

Our existing media system today is the direct result of government laws and subsidies that created it.

You will never ever, in any circumstance, win any struggle at any time. That being said, we have a long way to go. At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

The problem of how to make the Internet advertising friendly bewildered and obsessed Madison Avenue for much of the 1990s. Advertising won.

Very rarely are you going to see the large shareholder or CEO of a corporation march into a newsroom and say, "Cover this story, don't cover that." It's a much more subtle process. The professional code adapts, but what we try to see, is how commercial and corporate pressure shape both the professional code and the sorts of things that are considered legitimate journalism and illegitimate journalism.

If you go to go to countries in Europe or Asia or even Canada, even with all the Internet and cable TV and satellite, public systems tend to be the most popular stations in the countries. In some countries like Norway and Germany, public stations are, if anything, more popular than ever as people see what Rupert Murdoch's got in store for them in the commercial stations.

If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation.

Coverage of Iraq has plummeted, because people in power no longer want to talk about it suddenly. Journalists should be over there demanding front-page coverage, lead-story coverage every day. They should be demanding that no politician running for federal office can go to bed until they say what the hell they're going to do about Iraq and what how accountable they are for it.

So that what you tend to see is someone like a Rush Limbaugh, he's the classic case because he's the most successful, he didn't sort of like come out of his mother's womb with the highest ratings in the country.

When the government allocates monopoly rights to frequency, and there are only a handful in each community, it's picking the winners in the competition.

Basically what they're saying is, if you want to be on TV, if you want to be a credible candidate, you've got to buy ads. And if you're not buying ads, you're not a credible candidate, we don't cover you.

But having said that, there's also a sea change in attitude towards media.

When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn't setting the terms of the competition.

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 relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.

The number one lobby that opposes campaign finance reform in the United States is the National Association of Broadcasters.

The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd.

And understand that scarce spectrum is used today for example for cell phone operators, they have to pay for the airwaves they use, for their services.

In the last two years we've seen a sea change in the United States on media issues. Two years ago, people would have read this, then opened the window on the ledge of the 18th floor and jumped. They would have said, "Okay, it's over, there's nothing I can do, it's just getting worse." But in the last two years, what we've seen is that millions of Americans have gotten aware of the issue, they've organized on it, they've risen up, and we're seeing the beginnings of a burgeoning media reform movement across this country.

If you look at the history of broadcasting, what you find is the National Association of Broadcasters is a trade association whose mission is to protect the interests of the commercial broadcasters.

In the US, commercial interests stole the airwaves early on, before public broadcasters could get a stab at it. And the deal that was made with public broadcasting was, "Okay, we'll allow there to be a handful of public stations to do the educational programming that commercial broadcasters don't want to do, but the deal is they can't do anything that can generate an audience, anything that's commercially viable." Anything they do that could be commercially viable could be considered unfair competition to commercial interests and should only be on the commercial stations.

Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.

Deregulation is a popular term that's used across the political spectrum. And it's one of these terms like "choice," that corporate interests have used because they know their focus-group buzzword testing makes it sound like a popular word. Because, who can be against deregulation? Being free, having liberty, not having someone tell you what to do, being deregulated, hey, that sounds great. But deregulation is a non sequitur in the realm of media policy or media regulation. The issue is never regulation versus deregulation; our entire system is built on media policies and subsidies.

Now, the one thing that's clear is that we need nonprofit, noncommercial media - not just broadcasting - more than ever in the United States. We don't need a purely nonprofit, noncommercial system, but we need a significant nonprofit, noncommercial system. Advertising-run media, profit-driven media, simply is not acceptable as the entirety of our media system. There's no defense for it.

Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

The commercial broadcasters have tremendous influence in Washington, D.C., for a couple of reasons. First, they're extremely rich and they have lots of money and they have had for a long time, so they can give money to politicians, which gets their attention.

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

The whole process of getting licenses to broadcast, which took place decades ago, was done behind closed doors by powerful lobbies, and wealthy commercial interests got all the licenses with no public input, no congressional input for that matter.

One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials.

As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.

What I've found is that there is a tremendous interest in these issues, across the political spectrum, sort of left-right terms we used to describe people don't really hold here exactly.

The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.

And they've got to be held accountable; our broadcasting system has to be made accountable; and unless it is, it's going to be very hard to change anything else for the better in this country.

If you're running for reelection in the House of Representatives race, you know, it's very important to you that you be on fairly good terms with the local affiliates in the largest market in your area. I mean you don't want to antagonize them.

So the competition isn't once you got the license, running the station; it's getting the license.

A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.

The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective.

The current public television and radio system in the United States, while it's better than nothing, that's about the best you can say about it. It's nowhere near the standard it needs to be for our society, and we've got to make a commitment to rethink the system altogether. You know, just giving more money to what exists on PBS now would be not great; we've got to have a new vision of PBS.

Also, the commercial media in a superior position, really, to any other corporate lobby, because where would people hear about commercial media or corporate media criticism, where would they hear criticism of them other than in the commercial media?

But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

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.

The range of debate between the dominant U.S. [political] parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class.

Which is supposed to mean they're doing something in their broadcasting they would not do is they were simply out to maximize profit; if they were really public service institutions, not purely profit maximizing institutions.

Because Hightower's problem, among other things, is that advertisers would be a lot less interested in his show than in Limbaugh's, even if they have similar ratings, because of what Hightower is saying.

There is no real answer [to the U.S. economic crisis] but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.

An informed public democracy means rule of the people. A media system is absolutely essential to that process, if people are going to be political equals, they to have to have the information and tools so they can actually be participants. That's liberal democracy 101.