Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Communication Politics in Dubious Times

Robert W. McChesney

paperback

$18.95

The first paperback edition of a myth-breaking book on media, from one of today's most reputable and insightful media historians and critics.
Anyone who claims to care about the interaction between media and democracy can't not read McChesney's latest. 
-- Victor Navasky
Winner of Harvard's Goldsmith Book Prize as well as the Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, Rich Media, Poor Democracy destroys the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information "choices" is a democratic one. Robert McChesney, whom Marc Crispin Miller calls "the greatest of our media historians," maintains that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are no more than a handful of enormous corporations, and that this concentrated corporate control  is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy. 

In a book that Noam Chomsky hails as a "rich, penetrating study," McChesney combines historical sweep and unprecedented detail on current events as he chronicles the recent waves of media mergers and acquisitions, as well as 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 as a means of shielding corporate media power, and debunks the myth that the market compels media firms to "give the people what they want." 

Robert McChesney, a research 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 and other books on media.  He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Current Affairs / Political Science
Fall 2000
paperback
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 464 pages
978-1-56584-634-0

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