An outspoken critic of corporate media, Robert McChesney is also a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He gives the lie to the caricature of the professor as tenured cloud dweller, aloof from the mundane world the rest of us live in, a world where political and corporate power are becoming synonymous and mass opinion is increasingly stage-managed by multinational media conglomerates. He's an academic rarity: a media critic who has actually done a tour of duty in the workaday world of journalism. In 1979, McChesney co-founded The Rocket, a Seattle-based rock magazine that is still going strong (McChesney claims it has the third-largest circulation in its field in the United States). "It was a lot of fun," he told radio interviewer David Barsamian. "It gave me a lot of valuable experience in organizing a media operation, how you get people to work together and what you can accomplish. What I learned is that if you have people who are really dedicated and work hard, there's a lot you can do. There's no reason to sit around and whine. You can accomplish things. I say that with hesitation, because a lot of times when people say that, their implication is, 'Therefore, you don't need to make social change. ... You can just take care of number one and pull yourself up.' That's not my point at all. My point is, you can do things, but you can also do things to make social change. Ultimately, the core problems we face in the media and in our society are social problems. They require social solutions. We should be organizing and working together to change institutions." In a sense, he's doing just that in works of intellectual activism such as "Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy" and "Rich Media, Poor Democracy" (just out from University of Illinois Press) — calls to action that are as rigorously researched as they are politically passionate.
In November, 1999, McChesney was in Boulder, Colorado, to speak at the 20th anniversary celebration of the bookstore Left Hand Books where veteran broadcaster David Barsamian interviewed him for his weekly public radio program, "Alternative Radio."
BARSAMIAN: You make an urgent connection between media and democracy. Why?
MCCHESNEY: This is nothing original. This goes back to the Founding Fathers, even before that. If you have a notion of democracy, which is, the many rule, obviously you can't have a plebiscite on every decision. That's not going to happen. But people in representative democracies can make the fundamental value decisions and elect people to implement them. That's what we can hope for.
To have that be effective and viable, you need some sort of media system that's going to do two things. First of all, it's going to ruthlessly account for the activities of people in power and people who want to be in power so you know what they're actually doing. Secondly, it's going to give a wide range of opinions on the fundamental social and political issues that citizens need to know about. It doesn't mean that each medium has to do that, but the system as a whole has to provide that as an easy alternative for people who want to participate as citizens.
That's the test of a media system in a democracy. That's the test we should apply to it. By that standard, our current media system is a fiasco. It's a system set up fundamentally to serve the shareholders and a dozen or so massive companies and their major advertisers. It does that quite well. But it works more often than not directly against what's necessary for a democratic society.
We're such a commercially marinated society that our notion of speech to fellow citizens to bring truth through discussion and interaction has been pushed to the margins. Now the whole idea of speech is to make money. So whether something's true or false is irrelevant. If they buy your product, that's the truth. If they believe your lie, that's good enough. You get from them what you want. Completely lost in the dominant culture is the genuine notion of truth, a sense of how it comes as a result of dialogue and interaction and exchange. I think we have to get back to that, and our media system isn't going to get us there. It's part of the problem. It's Madison Avenue and Wall Street's media system.
The founding document for public broadcasting in the United States is the 1967 Carnegie Commission Report. Among other things, it said that public broadcasting programming "should serve as a forum for controversy and debate," be diverse and "provide a voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard." In roughly 30 years of TV service — PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), as well as National Public Radio — how closely aligned has the programming been to those founding principles?
It's gone almost nowhere near those principles. In fact, if one were to look at NPR or PBS today and say, What groups in society is it trying to give voice to?, it would not be the dispossessed, the marginalized, those outside the power structure. It's giving voice to the business community, the entrepreneurs, the upper middle class, the intelligentsia. It goes completely against the principles enunciated in the Carnegie report. I don't think anyone can claim otherwise. In NPR's audience data that they provide when they're trying to appeal to underwriters, they're bragging about the wealth, education and sophistication of their listeners. What they're going after is cherry-picking the most lucrative market of upper-class and upper-middle-class individuals. The last thing they seem to want to do is give voice to the 30 or 40 percent of our population that's basically written out of our broadcasting system.
In some of the discussions about public radio and TV, there's an underlying current that when they weren't as well funded and didn't have as many listeners, the programming was more cutting edge.
I'm not an expert on that. But my sense is that in TV, for example, prior to the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, National Educational Television, an early version of PBS, actually did some cutting-edge antiwar and civil rights stuff. They got tremendous political heat because of it. That's always been the case. When good stuff does get through that goes outside the boundaries of the establishment commercial system, that takes chances, that gives voice to people the commercial system doesn't, covers political perspectives the commercial system generally trivializes, they invariably take heat from Washington. Powerful people in Washington use their power. It's the worst of both worlds for public broadcasting. On one hand, they have to turn to corporations and the wealthy to support them because they don't get enough government support. On the other hand, they get enough government support that whenever someone takes chances they get reamed by political forces. They get it on both sides. The result is the very lame and tepid programming that you get.
But there's a fundamental issue here that's even more important in public broadcasting, and that is to understand the dilemma historically. Public broadcasting in most places in the world — Canada, India, Britain, Scandinavia, Germany — has generally been seen and crafted as being a nonprofit, noncommercial service for the entire population, with entertainment, educational and political programming covering the whole spectrum. In the United States, that was never the case. The reason was that the commercial broadcasters in the 1920s and 1930s were able to simply swipe the airwave space without any public recognition or understanding. Then, when public broadcasting came along, its job was simply to do the programming that the commercial stations couldn't make any money on. That was its mandate.
Some purists in public radio and TV want to jettison any government subsidies for the very reasons that you just alluded to. They feel that the system would be stronger, independent and not have to answer to Congress. What do you think about that point of view?
I think there are very legitimate concerns about setting up the system so that you can't have political censorship. But there are ways to do that without abandoning the public subsidy. We have to study how other countries have done it and see what the best way is to maintain a public subsidy but not permit constant interference by political sources.
The initial proposals to set up public broadcasting in the United States embodied in that Carnegie Commission report were to provide in fact what you just described: a heat shield for funding. There would be forward funding for about five years. However, there was an enormous political battle around that. Wilbur Mills was the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee at the time. He wanted to keep public broadcasting on a tight leash. So that heat shield never happened, and that has left the system vulnerable to these political influences.
We need a system that gives the heat shield, but we also need to keep it accountable. At the same time, we need a mission today that says public broadcasting should serve the entire population, which means programming in cities of diverse ethnic communities should be serving those communities, not simply serving people who want to watch "Wall Street Week" and zebras and giraffes. We need the commitment to serve the entire population. I think that commitment is more important today than ever before, because what we're seeing in our entire media culture is that the population is being fragmented into more and more segments determined by Madison Avenue advertisers who want to sell products. They're breaking us up into various groups. Increasingly they're putting walls between all of us and telling us how free we are now because we can just hang out in our own demographic group and see ads for the products we buy. We're losing something very important. Community broadcasting can provide the basis to see how other people in the community live, learn about them, share experiences and enrich a pluralistic society.
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