BOOK REVIEW / Seth Sandronsky
Making Media Democracy
The Web makes the press better, right? Not quite, writes Robert W. McChesney in Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy (Monthly Review Press, 2014).
A media scholar, he unpacks the demise of commercial journalism and its potential rise as a public good in the online era. Meanwhile, ad revenue plummets, as digital journalism appears, falsely, as a savior for print journalism. McChesney dissects the strengths and weaknesses of so-called new media. A sub-theme in his radical critique of the American political economy melds areas of agreement among and between the left and right. One example is opposition to multinational corporations’ monopoly presence in the economy. Consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph Nader has a slightly similar take. The over-arching problem of the corporate media is, argues McChesney, a symptom of the rot in the political economy of finance-monopoly capitalism. Marshalling empirical evidence of that, e.g., absence of competition in key industries thanks in part to Uncle Sam’s intervention, he in wide-ranging essays and an interview calls for “post-capitalist democracy.” McChesney defines and elaborates this term, perhaps less threatening than socialism to some…
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