Robert McChesney on democracy and the media

Robert McChesney teaches communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his most recent book, The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review, 2008), Professor McChesney examines the interconnecting influence of economics, history, sociology, and technology on journalism and media systems. He kindly took time this past April to speak to G&R. GR: One of the things you write about over and over in the book is how essential a free and independent media is to a functioning democracy. Is public broadcasting as we know it today"PBS and NPR"what you have in mind when you talk about this? RM: I think that public broadcasting, or as I call it, public media, is definitely a big part of a viable media system in a self-governing society. That doesn't mean specifically that NPR or PBS are what I have in mind. I would say they have serious weaknesses and flaws and need to be really restructured eventually, reorganized. I also think that, when I talk about public media or public broadcasting, my vision is really just non-profit, not-commercial and rather heterogeneous. I think that you don't only want to have one type of public system or public station. I mean local, community stations, student based stations, low-power stations, in addition to regional or national networks is very important. GR: Is it worth sending money when they ask us to, to public tv and public radio? Are they worth salvaging? Is that where media activists should be putting their energy and their resources? RM: You're tacking more than one question before the question mark. Whether people actually give money to their local NPR station or their local community station: I can't answer that for them. That really depends on your own media environment and your community, how you do that. The second half of that question, which is: should that be the be-all, end-all of media activism? I can answer that. No. That should not even be part of your media activism. GR: One of the common criticisms from the mainstream of radical media criticism like yours, Noam Chomsky's, Edward S. Herman's, something that I've heard said, is something to the effect of: "Well, you guys are talking about how all this information is suppressed or obscured and so forth, but you found it, so it must be out there. Therefore, things must be working all right. The system must be functioning." How do you respond when you hear that? RM: Well, it's sort of a preposterous comment. I don't think it's ever made in good faith. It's made by people who don't want to deal with the criticism, flailing for any possible reason to ignore the criticism. By that logic, it'd be very difficult to find any media system that couldn't be attacked. The critics of Pravda could find material in the Soviet Union libraries or samizdats (Soviet-era underground media networks) to be critical of Pravda and TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union). That didn't mean therefore, Pravda and TASS were doing a great job or were acceptable for a free society. So, it seems like a bizarre form of criticism and one that's not based on actually reading the criticism and responding to it, but one that's based on saying "I'm not going to read this criticism, because I don't want to entertain the logical conclusions of it," that,–I'm just going to dismiss it categorically." GR: You have a very interesting essay in your book about the American Civil Liberties Union and the First Amendment and how capitalism and commercialism have changed the way that the First Amendment has been read and how it's been used and interpreted. You talk a good bit about how the ACLU has a fundamentalist approach to the First Amendment which has sort of ignored that fact that the wealthier voices drown out the smaller voices. Can you talk a little bit about how the First Amendment could be understood and applied in a way that could overcome some of those disparities between volume or access to an audience. RM: The First Amendment is poorly understood even by those who are its strongest, self-proclaimed advocates and the notion of being a First Amendment absolutist, which is oftentimes used, is a nonsensical designation. It means nothing except that: "If you disagree with me, I absolutely think you hate democracy and our Constitution." But it's really a nonsensical designation. We have an exceptionally poor understanding of what is covered by the First Amendment, what the significance is… I think most of the discussion of the First Amendment is preposterous in this country. It's not based on really studying it or understanding or grasping it in its many dimensions. And let me explain in a couple of ways what I really mean by that. For one thing, the First Amendment has five distinct portions of it, protections involved: freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, right to assemble, and right to redress grievances to the government. In my view, and I think in the view of most people, these are truly extraordinary and important freedoms and should be protected. But if you think about it, it doesn't really answer a lot of the really difficult and common questions that emerge. It sounds great on paper, but as our Supreme Court history and our real-world history has demonstrated, what precisely the First Amendment means is very much up to interpretation and debate and to a large extent, that have been resolved by the political balance of power in the country at any given particular time. That's determined what we think of when we think of the First Amendment. So, in the piece you're referring to, I was talking about, among other things, advertising what's called commercial speech. It's increasingly been given protection under the First Amendment. Now, this is a preposterous notion, that commercial speech, something done, at large, by a very small number of wealthy corporations to propagandize people to change their behavior to make money off of them, should be granted the same space as political speech. It was considered ludicrous as recently as the middle of the 20th century, two generations ago. In fact, the first time the Supreme Court even considered this, I think it shot down the idea 9-0 and couldn't have been more contemptuous in its opinions. This was in 1942. But as our society has become dramatically more commercialized, in the intervening 70 years, it pretty much got to where if the First Amendment doesn't cover advertising, and protect it from regulation then since everything's commercialized, what does it protect? That's sort of the dilemma we have in our hyper-commercialized society… It's the absolutism of fools because if the First Amendment covers everything commercial, in the end it doesn't really cover anything of value or anything at all. It loses its meaning. Because what it means when you extend the First Amendment to cover advertising, it's not like you're opening up the world to all sorts of ideas that would be repressed otherwise. Nothing of the kind. It just means that you're telling the corporate community that the speech they use to sell products and to try to change people's behavior can't be regulated. It's no longer subject to government regulation. So, instead of expanding democracy, you're shrinking the range of what democracy covers, including advertising. That aspect of corporate behavior, according to the Constitution, is off limits to public review. That was the point I was trying to make in that essay: the absurdity of that position. It fairness to some mainstream and liberal commentators and some ACLU people, there is a debate on this. There are some people who hold my position, fortunately. But, in my opinion, my position really isn't very debatable. It's amazing that anyone would hold the other position. But I understand why they do. The other place where the First Amendment is dreadfully misunderstood, and where the notion of absolutism means nothing, is the question of freedom of the press. Now, freedom of the press is different from freedom of speech, or else it wouldn't be put separately in the First Amendment. They'd just put freedom of speech and everyone would say that automatically covers any form of speech. But no, they put freedom of the press and rights to freedom of the press separate from freedom of speech, because then, as now, they were two related but very distinct phenomena. And what the so-called absolutist position has come to adopt is the view that freedom of the press and freedom of speech are synonymous. Just like freedom of speech means you can stand on a street corner and do whatever you want and the government can't stop you unless you break a law, likewise, freedom of the press means anyone can start a medium and do whatever they want and that's what freedom of the press guarantees, that it will be a privately run, no government role press system, and that's the only way you can have a truly free press. That's preposterous. It doesn't accord to our history at all or to our present day reality. Promoting a press system is totally different from individual speech. It requires resources. It requires industrial organization. And not everyone can do it. And the Founders understood that without a viable press system, the Constitutional system wouldn't work, and it was the first duty of the state to make sure we had a viable press system. So they implemented massive, extraordinary postal and printing subsidies to spawn a vibrant press system. There's no illusion that having the government do nothing was acceptable. So I think the real tradition of the First Amendment in this country is one where the government plays a central role in making sure we have a viable press with resources and structure, and at the same time we make sure the government does not censor the content of that press. And we've only gotten the second half since the corporate system has come into play in the last century and the PR people have gotten a hold of it. We only understand the second half of it, that the government should not censor content. But the first half, while it still exists, it's no longer understood what a central part of having a press system that government policies and subsidies are and we definitely need to reclaim that understanding of freedom of the press, or else we're going to be unable to address the great media crisis of our times in the next decade. Nick Holt's website is gritsandroses.org