Robert McChesney is a media critic, academic, and activist. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies.

McChesney was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He, along with John Bellamy foster, studied Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA under Dr. Alan G. Nasser. In his early years, he worked as a sports stringer for UPI, published a weekly newspaper, and in 1979 was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle-based rock magazine which chronicled the birth of the Seattle rock scene of the late 1980s and 1990s. McChesney received a Ph.D. in communications at the University of Washington in 1989. From 1988 to 1998 he was on the Journalism and Mass Communication faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He is also the founder and president of Free Press and host of the radio show Media Matters, broadcast on WILL-AM at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is a research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Information and Library Science.

He is married to Inger Stole and has two daughters.

Books

• 1993, 2004: Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935
• 1997: Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy
• 1997: The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (with Edward Herman)
• 1999, 2000: Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
• 2000: It's the Media, Stupid! (with John Nichols )
  • forewords by: Paul Wellstone, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Ralph Nader
• 2002: Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (with John Nichols)
  • introductions by Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Barbara Ehrenreich
• 2003: The Big Picture: Understanding Media Through Political Economy (with John Bellamy Foster )
• 2004 The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century
• 2004 Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism (Edited with Ben Scott)

External links

• Disinfopedia: Robert McChesney
• Official website, with bio, articles, etc.
• Media Matters website
• Free Press