In over a dozen books, he explored the failures of journalism and the internet, blaming capitalism and calling for the nationalization of Facebook and Google.
Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72.
The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Inger Stole, said.
Professor McChesney was grounded both in academia — he had a Ph.D. in communications and taught at universities — and in ink-on-paper journalism: He was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine that reviewed Nirvana’s first single.
His primary thesis, expressed in more than a dozen books and in scores of articles and interviews, was that corporate-owned news media was overly compliant with the political powers that be and that it restricted the views Americans were exposed to. He further argued that the promise of the internet — of a Wild West market of opinions — had been throttled by a few giant owners of online platforms.
An early book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” (1999), warned that consolidation in journalism would undermine democratic norms. In perhaps his best-known work, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy” (2013), he rejected the utopian view that the digital revolution would usher in an open frontier of information sources and invigorate democracy.
Instead, he showed how the internet was devastating the business model for newspapers, while supplanting civically minded coverage of local government with lowest-common-denominator fluff: celebrity gossip, cat videos and personal naval gazing.
Professor McChesney blamed capitalism.
“The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising — all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism — are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop,” he wrote.