Robert W. McShesney, an influential, left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that the Silicon Valley billionaire who dominated online information was a threat to democracy, died on March 25th at his home in Madison, Wisconsin.
The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, said his wife, Inger, stole it.
Both Professor McChesney were grounded in academia. He had a PhD. I’m taught communication and at university. And Ink-On Paper Journalism: He was the founder of Rocket, the Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana’s first single.
His main papers were expressed in more than a dozen books and numerous articles and interviews, but the corporate-owned news media was overly compliant with a certain political force, limiting the views that Americans were exposed to. He further argued that the internet (the promise of the wild west market of opinion) was squeezed by some huge owners of online platforms.
An early book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999) warned that the integration of journalism undermines democratic norms. Perhaps his most famous work, “Digital Cutting: How Capitalism Does the Internet Against Democracy” (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would arrive at the public frontier of sources and stimulate democracy.
Instead, he shows how the internet is destroying the business model of newspapers, while local government civilly hearted coverage features the lowest common denominator fluff, celebrity gossip, cat videos, and personal naval gaze.
Professor McChesney condemned capitalism.
“Profit motivation, commercialism, public relations, marketing, advertising – all the critical features of modern corporate capitalism – are the basis for an assessment of how the Internet can develop and potentially develop,” he writes.
Source: www.nytimes.com
