The late media scholar Robert McChesney. Photo: University of Illinois

The death of the American media scholar Robert McChesney on March 25th is a significant loss for anyone worried about the future of democracy and journalism.

The 72-year-old McChesney, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumour more than a year earlier, wrote or edited 27 books examining media, democracy and journalism. He was also co-founder of Free Press, an advocacy group working for a free and open Internet as well as more democratic and diverse media.

As part of its recent tribute to him, the American news program Democracy Now played excerpts from a 2013 interview in which McChesney argued that instead of being an open forum for ideas and debate, the Internet has been captured by powerful, corporate monopolies.

“I think most people are oblivious to what’s taken place,” McChesney said, adding that as long as they can visit their favourite web sites and express their opinions on social media platforms, people think everything’s fine.

“But it doesn’t really work that way,” he said. “What’s been taking place — and I think it’s really crystallized in the last five years — is that on a number of different fronts, extraordinarily large, monopolistic corporations have emerged.”

He mentioned the huge telecommunications companies that charge steep prices for Internet access and the online platforms such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon that generate trillions in revenues for themselves as they dominate the Web, buy up smaller rivals and build their world-wide empires.

“These firms have changed the nature of the Internet dramatically,” McChesney said before referring to The Death and Life of American Journalism, the 2010 book he co-authored with John Nichols.

“And what they’re able to do is collect information on us that’s absolutely unbelievable — we have no privacy anymore — and use that information to sell us to advertisers,” he said.

“And then, I think most strikingly, what I get at in the book is that they work closely with the government and the national security state and the military. They really walk hand-in-hand collecting this information, monitoring people, in ways that, by all democratic theory, are inimical to a free society.”

Local journalism in crisis

McChesney noted that the big Internet players have attracted the advertisers which used to fatten the profits of traditional newspapers, but that are now being driven out of business.

CCPA report cover

(A recent report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives points out that since 2008, Canada has lost 11% of its print media outlets or roughly 25 of them per year since 2014. Here in Tantramar, the Sackville Tribune-Post closed in 2020.)

McChesney and Nichols’s book begins with a quote from then-U.S. President Barack Obama:

“I am concerned that if the direction of news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void, but not a lot of mutual understanding.”

One possible solution suggested by both McChesney and the CCPA report would be to strengthen public broadcasters such as the CBC and revise their mandates to include an emphasis on providing local news.

In Britain, for example, the BBC has been working with more than 200 local media organizations representing more than 1,100 print, online and broadcast outlets to provide coverage of municipal councils and other local bodies and events.

The BBC’s Local News Partnerships, launched in 2017, employs up to 165 local reporters.

But anything like it won’t happen here if the Conservatives win the April 28 election and carry out their threat to shut the CBC down.

“A world without journalism is not a world without political information. Instead it is a world where what passes for news is largely spin and self-interested propaganda,” McChesney and Nichols wrote in their book.

“It is an environment that spawns cynicism, ignorance, demoralization and apathy. The only “winners” are those that benefit from a quiescent and malleable people who will ‘be governed’ rather than govern themselves.”

Note: A local symposium will be held in Sackville on June 14th to discuss how to foster local journalism in the Maritimes. For more details, click here.