Robert McChesney On This Friday’s Mediageek Radioshow

Media scholar Robert McChesney will be my guest on this Friday’s mediageek radioshow (5:30 PM Friday at 90.1 FM for those of you in Central Illinois). It also happens to be pledge drive time at my station, WEFT, and Bob is a true pledge drive pro, so I’m very happy he’s offered to be on. Bob said he might also be bringing along Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive magazine, but we won’t know until the show actually happens.

McChesney’s most recent book is Our Media, Not Their’s, which he co-authored with John Nichols of the Nation Magazine.

They both also have an article on FCC Commissioner Michael Copps in the April issue of the Progressive. In it they chart Copps remarkable exceptionalism in defending the public interest within an agency that more often adjudicates between competing corporate interests:

“But the big media had not figured in the Copps effect. Unwilling to roll over and allow the crushing of some of the last vestiges of regulatory protection for real diversity in media, Copps began to raise public interest concerns with a force not heard on the FCC since Nicholas Johnson challenged the corporate line back in the 1960s or Clifford Durr battled the networks as a progressive New Dealer in the 1940s. …

To understand how remarkable Copps’s questioning of the commission’s course is, consider what had been status quo for the FCC. Recall that former FCC Chairman William Kennard acknowledged that before he took the job in 1997 he was advised by a longtime FCC member that his job was ‘to referee fights between the very wealthy and the very, very wealthy,’ with the public entirely uninvolved in the FCC’s affairs.”


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