By Elliot Boswell
The newspaper industry is in turmoil. This is a well-known fact. Readership has been dropping, there have been layoffs nationwide and independent papers have been folding left and right. Even in our own backyard, The Oregonian has made several "voluntary buyout offers" in an effort to prune its budget, some of these coming even before the current economic crisis.
In light of all this, the voice of Robert McChesney is growing increasingly important. McChesney, a noted free press advocate, is presenting a speech titled "Media and the Battle for America" tonight at 7 p.m. in the Buckley Center Auditorium, on what promises to be a topic of central importance to the American public.
"He's one of the leading voices, one of the prophetic voices, in the field of media reform," said communications professor Michael Mulcrone. "He's a big public intellectual at a time when most intellectualism never leaves the college campus."
McChesney is a research professor at the University of Illinois whose work is often concerned with the role and effects of media in a democratic society. His recent writing has diagnosed the issues of a deregulated media, considering it in the context of legislative and political aspects.
"He (McChesney) says, and I agree, that the media is kind of like the central nervous system of any democracy," Mulcrone said. "This is a critical juncture for the mass media, especially in our country. It's a crisis. And I would argue that it's failing us."
Joe Freeman, sports reporter for The Oregonian and UP alum, disagreed with Mulcrone on the severity of the problem.
"I wouldn't say it's (the media) in crisis mode yet," Freeman said. "But it would be absolutely correct to say that we're in a transitional period. This is an evolving industry, an ever-changing media world, and what with the economy turning sour recently, it's sort of been the perfect storm of events."
Like Ari Shapiro, one of last year's visiting speakers on The Bluff, McChesney is a visible radio figure as the host of "Media Matters" on the University of Illinois's WILL-AM radio station, a call-in talk show that has featured guests as prominent as Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal.
Danny Schechter, founder of MediaChannel.org, a media watchdog Web site, and a former guest on "Media Matters," has called McChesney the "definitive" scholar of media affairs.
"As Chomsky is to linguistics, Ben & Jerry's to ice cream, and Elvis to shaking one's hips, McChesney is to media analysis. He is the King," Schechter wrote in a review of McChesney's book, "The Political Economy of Media."
McChesney began his career in 1979 as founder of The Rocket, a now-defunct Seattle newspaper that focused primarily on the local music scene in the Pacific Northwest. After receiving his doctorate in communication studies from the University of Washington in 1989, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving on to a professorship at U of I. He is the author of numerous books, one of which, "Rich Media, Poor Democracy," was awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize in 1999.
