In 2009 McChesney said that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself … to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.” Deriding advertising as “the voice of capital,” he wrote: “We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it.”
“Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism,” McChesney and John Nichols wrote in March 2009. Asserting that “the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened,” McChesney emphasized that his “radical” goal of developing a “post-corporate” media under “public control” was a matter of considerable “urgency.”
Proclaiming that “the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists,” McChesney in 2009 told the website SocialistProject that “unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution.” This was “one of the core issues,” he explained, “that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.” A campaign “to democratize the media system so that people without property can play a much larger role in the media and in political life,” McChesney added, would likely result in “a marked shift to the political Left.”
The way to achieve meaningful media reform, said McChesney in 2010, would be to make government the chief benefactor of all media and high-tech infrastructure. Toward that end, he advocated a $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press that would include, among other reforms: a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists; a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer funds to struggling media entities; massive subsidies for journalism schools; corporate welfare for newspapers; and government control over the press and its infrastructure. He also called for the creation of a “Public Media Trust Fund,” which would raise money to fund government-run media by imposing steep taxes on Internet connections, mobile phones, and all manner of electronic devices.
For years, McChesney has been a leading advocate of Net Neutrality—a concept whose objective, as pro-free-market policy analyst Phil Kerpen puts it, is “to empower the federal government to ration and apportion Internet bandwidth as it sees fit, and to thereby control the Internet’s content.” For a more comprehensive definition and discussion of Net Neutrality, click here.
“At the moment,” said McChesney in August 2009, “the battle over [N]etwork [N]eutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
The Barack Obama administration, meanwhile, was highly receptive to McChesney's ideas on media reform and Net Neutrality. In 2010, Obama's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop series titled “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” Further, the FTC released Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism, a 47-page discussion draft that reproduced a number of McChesney's proposals almost verbatim. McChesney himself was invited to deliver a major address at an FTC event on these issues.
McChesney's efforts on behalf of Net Neutrality were buttressed by immense financial support from left-wing charitable foundations. Most notably, between 2000 and 2013 George Soros's Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation spearheaded an alliance of philanthropies that gave more than $196 million to pro-Net Neutrality groups like Free Press and the Center for American Progress. These efforts and expenditures eventually paid dividends in February 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in favor of implementing Net Neutrality. In the aftermath of that FCC decision, John Fund wrote that “[d]espite his astonishingly radical goals, McChesney’s Free Press group was able to leverage foundation cash and academic 'research' into an influential force behind [N]et [N]eutrality.” For example, Fund noted:
“Julius Genachowski, President Obama’s first FCC chairman, hired Free Press’s Jen Howard as his press secretary. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, has co-authored a Free Press report demanding regulation of political talk radio. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan cited research from Free Press and other left-wing groups backing [N]et [N]eutrality more than 50 times.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2227
