Remembering Robert McChesney, Prescient Critic of Media Consolidation & Big Tech

We bear in mind media scholar Robert McChesney, the co-founder of the advocacy group Free Press, who died on March 25 at age 72. McChesney was a professor on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a prolific creator, with practically three dozen books on media, democracy and digital rights. He warned a long time in the past that company consolidation of the press was placing an excessive amount of energy within the arms of rich pursuits, and was an early critic of Huge Tech’s management over on-line communications. “What we’ve seen is that the web was promised to be this nice engine of financial competitors. It was going to spur financial progress, create all these new companies, big quantities of jobs. Bear in mind the time period ‘new financial system’ from the late ’90s? And as a substitute what we have seen is the web is arguably the largest generator of monopoly in historical past,” says McChesney in a 2013 excerpt from considered one of his many appearances on Democracy Now! through the years. We additionally communicate along with his longtime pal and collaborator John Nichols, nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation. “Bob McChesney was one of many nice public intellectuals of our period,” says Nichols. “He may have simply lived within the ivory tower. As an alternative, he selected to turn into an activist.”