RICH MEDIA, POOR DEMOCRACY: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

[Doug Schuler]

FYI, here is a book that addresses the media environment - past,
current, and future.  Books like this should be required reading for
those of us working on digital access issues and policy.  (just kidding
about being "required" -- how about "recommended?")

-- Doug

PS.  Feel free to forward this note...



An Extraordinary New Book from the
University of Illinois Press
Publication date: October 4th


"If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book. If Paul
Revere were here, he would spread the word. Thank God we have in Robert
McChesney their equal in his love of liberty and his passion to reclaim
it from the media giants who treat the conversation of democracy as
their private property." — BILL MOYERS

___________________________________________________

RICH MEDIA, POOR DEMOCRACY
Communication Politics in Dubious Times

ROBERT W. McCHESNEY
___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

PREPUBLICATION OFFER!

Order now at 20% off: $25.95
Deadline: September 30, 1999   Mention code "MRP"

Toll-Free Phone Orders: 800-545-4703 (U.S. only)
Advance orders will be shipped immediately upon publication. Credit
cards will be billed at that time.

P&h $3.50; $.50 each additional book. Credit cards will be billed exact
postage amount.

INTERNATIONAL ORDERS: and Maryland orders (410) 516-6927
Fax Orders: (410) 516-6969

424 pages. Cloth, ISBN 0-252-02448-6. $32.95
___________________________________________________

Robert McChesney argues that the media have become a significant
anti-democratic force in the United States, and, to varying degrees,
worldwide. He addresses the corporate media explosion and the
corresponding implosion of public life that characterizes our times.
Challenging the assumption that a society drenched in commercial
information "choices" is ipso facto a democratic one, McChesney argues
that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are
wealthy investors, advertisers, and a handful of enormous media,
computer, and telecommunications corporations. This concentrated
corporate control, McChesney maintains, is disastrous for any notion of
participatory democracy.

Combining historical sweep with unprecedented detail on current events,
McChesney chronicles the waves of media mergers and acquisitions in the
late 1990s. He reviews the corrupt and secretive enactment of public
policies surrounding the Internet, digital television, and public
broadcasting. He also addresses the gradual and ominous adaptation of
the First Amendment ("freedom of the press") as a means of shielding
corporate media power and the wealthy.

The book exposes several myths about the media–in particular that the
market compels media firms to "give people what they want." If we value
our democracy, McChesney warns, we must organize politically to
restructure the media in order to reaffirm their connection to
democracy.  

ROBERT W. McCHESNEY, a research associate professor in the Institute of
Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and
Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
is the author of Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The
Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-35 and other books on
media.

"It may be true that the medium is the message. But it is probably truer
to say that power is the message. And in Rich Media, Poor Democracy,
Robert McChesney documents that claim with awesome scholarship and a
compelling style. Those who want to know about the relationship of media
and democracy must read this book." — NEIL POSTMAN, author of
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

"For those concerned with the future of our democracy, and the
conditions for that democracy—citizen participation and informed public
discourse—Bob McChesney's book will be of great interest. A
sophisticated and provocative analysis of the troubling oligopolistic
trends sweeping through our media system and so much of our economy
today." — U. S. Senator PAUL WELLSTONE

"Thanks to Robert McChesney's work over the years, I have been able to
successfully impersonate a media expert on a number of occasions. I
don't expect to be doing much more of that, though, because with Rich
Media, Poor Democracy anyone can become an expert on our profit-driven,
celebrity-obsessed, schlock-soaked media and what needs to be done to
repair them. It's a rare book that combines such a wealth of data with
such fearlessly sweeping analytical thinking." — BARBARA EHRENREICH,
author of Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

"A muckraker in the classical tradition, Robert McChesney does for the
myths and media lords of our day what Ida Tarbell and Matthew Josephson
did for the robber barons of theirs. With mountains of assiduously
collected facts, through a devastating perusal of the literature of
power, and in a tone alternately earnest and ironic, he has given us a
book we most desperately need." — THOMAS FRANK, author of The Conquest
of Cool

"Robert McChesney is a public intellectual of the first order. One of
the world's leading scholars of the political economy of the media, in
this book he presents his own original and path-breaking research in a
highly accessible and enter-taining language." — SUT JHALLY, University
of Massachusetts at Amherst

"Here it is—the comprehensive story of how giant corporations are taking
control of the mass media on a global scale, even though the American
people legally own the public airwaves. This corporatist grasping for
ever more profit, power and content determination stifles the people's
reach of their First Amendment rights and debilitates a weakening
democracy with trivia, cheap entertainment, and low grade sensuality at
eye-blinking velocities. Rich Media, Poor Democracy is more than a
prolonged wake-up call; it shames those who do nothing and motivates
those who are trying to build a more democratic media that reflects the
all-important non-commercial values which forge a just society." — RALPH
NADER

"McChesney's rich and penetrating study advances considerably his
pioneering work on media and democracy — or "media versus democracy,"
increasingly an accurate portrayal, he demonstrates. Particularly timely
is his review and analysis of emerging technologies. Their future is
currently a terrain of struggle, but proceeding largely beyond the
public eye. This is a grave problem with ominous import, which
McChesney's very significant contribution should serve to remedy." —
NOAM CHOMSKY

"This is a book for anyone who wants to know, first, why the media have
gone so wrong, and why democracy is (therefore) in big trouble. More
importantly, it is a book for anyone who wants to make things better: a
book that points us toward the only real political solutions. And this
learned survey does it all with an exemplary lucidity, a bracing air of
grown-up passion and (not least) a winning sense of humor. Rich Media,
Poor Democracy will reconfirm Robert McChesney's growing reputation as
the greatest of our media historians." — MARK CRISPIN MILLER, author of
Boxed In: The Culture of TV

"This is a tour de force analysis of the history and importance of
public media systems in democracies. McChesney offers convincing
evidence that commercial media have no incentive to promote civic
discourse or to serve the public good." — LANCE BENNETT, Department of
Political Science, University of Washington

"Professor McChesney is the uninvited guest at the media industry gala,
the outsider who knows the media business as well as the moguls do. In
plain language, he shows how participatory democracy is shrinking
beneath the weight of federally-sanctioned media conglomerates that are
laughing all the way to the bank. And he tells how to reverse the
process – to revitalize both journalism and democracy." — JEFF COHEN,
co-author of Wizards of Media Oz and founder of FAIR

"An indispensable guide to what's wrong and how to fix it, making
mincemeat of the rationalization that mass media only gives people what
they want." — Danny Schechter, TV producer and author of The More You
Watch, the Less You Know

"Anyone who claims to care about the interaction between media and
democracy can't not read McChesney's latest. This activist-professor not
only identifies and analyzes the problem in global (not to mention
cyber) terms, but he tells us what to do about it." — VICTOR NAVASKY,
Publisher and Editorial Director, The Nation

" Don't just read this book. . . . If nothing else, whack some
politicians over the head with it to get their attention to this growing
crisis in our democratic dialogue." — JIM HIGHTOWER, radio commentator
and author of There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow
Stripes and Dead Armadillos

"A deep and richly textured examination of the developing worldwide
corporate media environment and its impact on public life. This book
should provoke the vigorous, informed debate that is needed if the needs
of citizenship are to survive the new media atmosphere." — BILL KOVACH,
Curator, Nieman Foundation, Harvard University; former chief of New York
Times' Washington bureau and editor-in-chief, Atlanta Journal and
Constitution

"A highly documented picture of the deepening control of our mass media
by the world's largest corporations, and what this means to citizens who
need unbiased news about their society in order to sustain a true
democracy." — BEN BAGDIKIAN, author of The Media Monopoly

"McChesney. . . . provokes an absolutely necessary discussion on the
relationship between the control of information and our hopes for a
genuine democracy." — HOWARD ZINN

___________________________________________________


A volume in the series The History of Communication, edited by Robert W.
McChesney and John C. Nerone

___________________________________________________

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Media-Democracy Paradox

PART I: Politics
U.S. Media at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century
The Media System Goes Global
Will the Internet Set Us Free?

PART II: History
Educators and the Battle for Control of 
U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-35
Public Broadcasting: Past, Present, . . . and Future?
The New Theology of the First Amendment:
Class Privilege over Democracy

Conclusion: The U.S. Left and Media Politics

___________________________________________________

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