McChesney, Robert

McCHESNEY, ROBERT (1952-2025). Professionally a formidable leftwing figure in media studies, McChesney stood out as a notable Marxist scholar, editor, interviewer, and activist.

Born in Cleveland, son of an advertising salesman for This Week magazine, a supplement to Sunday newspapers, Robert Waterman McChesney graduated from the exclusive Pomfret Academy in Connecticut. For his undergraduate work, he enrolled at Antioch College before transferring to the experimental and progressive Evergreen State College in Oregon.

After graduating and lacking a clear career path, McChesney first went to work for a near-bankrupt alternative weekly, then turned to publish his own monthly magazine that explored the vital rock music scene in Seattle. The Rocket was a success, with McChesney, following in his father’s footsteps, covering the budget by selling advertising. The Rocket also featured comic art, both story-telling and satirical, and contributors included two future comics/animation giants Lynda Barry and Matt Groening, who later created “The Simpsons.” In 1983, McChesney returned to academic studies and enrolled in the graduate program in communications at University of Washington. Deeply devoted to sports and drawn to political issues, he wrote an M.A. thesis on the intensifying capitalist manipulations of games. Overall, he focused his graduate studies on the corporate, capitalist underpinnings of communications, which became his signature political and scholarly work.

An avid reader of Monthly Review (MR) and particularly impressed by editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, McChesney rapidly absorbed their take on political economy, notably the writings of the late Paul Baran among others. He served as a member of the MR editorial board, 2000-2004, and remained a valued advisor until late in his life. Former college friend John Bellamy Foster became MR editor, and the two remained close intellectually and politically.

Few other American radicals before McChesney had taught or written in the academic field of communications. Herbert Schiller at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign stood nearly alone, buttressed mainly by British scholars, above all Raymond Williams. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman—both writers for MR—had already begun hammering the corporate media as social critics. McChesney struck out by examining various progressive efforts to reform and democratize American media. Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting 1928-35 (1993) quickly became the landmark work of Left scholarship. Meanwhile, he wrote frequently for Monthly Review and scholarly journals and spoke widely on the ongoing monopolization of print, radio and television.

McChesney emerged as a leading scholar of the global struggle for media reform, co-authoring with Ed Herman The New Global Media: The Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (1997). He warned of worse developments ahead. Journalism, he insisted, had largely ceased to serve the public good, a development vastly accelerated by the Internet. The impact was especially dire in the Global South, more so than in the traditional homes of capital. McChesney emerged as a prime promoter of “net neutrality,” a policy demanding the equal treatment of all internet providers.

Media Democracy (1999), widely regarded as a wakeup call to radicals, led to the formation of a new media organization, The Free Press, which campaigned to protect net neutrality. In response to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which promoted competition and deregulation, McChesney rallied forces, including many professional journalists fired or now constrained in their messages. Teaming up with Wisconsin journalist John Nichols, McChesney co-authored Our Media, Not Theirs (2002), which reached the best-seller list. Various reformers, including a handful of prominent conservatives, joined the battle. McChesney meanwhile created and personally hosted “Media Matters,” from public radio station WILL at the University of Illinois, where he was then teaching. Between 2000 and 2012, stations around the country broadcast this program, which featured radical criticism extending far beyond the media proper. People Get Ready (2016), written with John Nichols and published by Nation books, laid out the programs proposed by Bernie Sanders and democratic socialists against the advancing threat of twenty-first century fascism.

Robert McChesney issued a timely conclusion to his life’s work: “The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising –all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to ayu assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop.”

“Robert W. McChesney (1952-2025) On the Shoulders of a Giant,” Monthly Review, Vol.77 (December, 2025), with contributions by Inger Stole, John Bellamy Foster, John Nichols, Bernie Sanders and others.