Remembering Robert McChesney, Prescient Critic of Media Consolidation & Big Tech
We remember 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 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a prolific author, with nearly three dozen books on media, democracy and digital rights. He warned decades ago that corporate consolidation of the press was putting too much power in the hands of wealthy interests, and was an early critic of Big Tech’s control over online communications. “What we’ve seen is that the internet was promised to be this great engine of economic competition. It was going to spur economic growth, create all these new businesses, huge amounts of jobs. Remember the term 'new economy' from the late '90s? And instead what we've seen is the internet is arguably the biggest generator of monopoly in history,” says McChesney in a 2013 excerpt from one of his many appearances on Democracy Now! over the years. We also speak with his longtime friend and collaborator John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. “Bob McChesney was one of the great public intellectuals of our era,” says Nichols. “He could have easily lived in the ivory tower. Instead, he chose to become an activist.”