Robert Waterman McChesney Quotes

One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials.

As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.

And they've got to be held accountable; our broadcasting system has to be made accountable; and unless it is, it's going to be very hard to change anything else for the better in this country.

If you look at the history of broadcasting, what you find is the National Association of Broadcasters is a trade association whose mission is to protect the interests of the commercial broadcasters.

When the government allocates monopoly rights to frequency, and there are only a handful in each community, it's picking the winners in the competition.

Our existing media system today is the direct result of government laws and subsidies that created it.

And understand that scarce spectrum is used today for example for cell phone operators, they have to pay for the airwaves they use, for their services.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

So the competition isn't once you got the license, running the station; it's getting the license.

If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation.

The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd.

In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants.

But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

What I've found is that there is a tremendous interest in these issues, across the political spectrum, sort of left-right terms we used to describe people don't really hold here exactly.

You know, a left-winger, the barrier to success if you're on the left in commercial radio is a mile and a half higher than it is if you're on the right.

The range of debate between the dominant U.S. [political] parties tends to closely resemble the range of debate within the business class.

There is no real answer [to the U.S. economic crisis] but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.

The problem of how to make the Internet advertising friendly bewildered and obsessed Madison Avenue for much of the 1990s. Advertising won.

Copyright protects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media conglomeratesm encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture.

Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.