Robert W. McChesney (1952–2025): A Personal and Political-Intellectual Memoir

      December 6, 2025
John Bellamy Foster
Robert (Bob) Waterman McChesney and I met each other in September 1973, within days of his arrival at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where I had been studying for two years. Bob was 21 and I had just turned 20. We immediately became fast friends. Bob had grown up in a conservative environment in suburban Cleveland, where his father, Samuel Parker McChesney, sold advertising for This Week magazine. His mother Edna (Meg) McChesney (née McCorkle) was a nurse but left nursing to become a homemaker before he was born. After attending high school at Pomfret, a private boarding (prep) school in Connecticut, he enrolled in college at Antioch in Ohio, transferring from there to Evergreen.

(Left to right) Inger, Bob, and John (Bellamy Foster) circa 2015. (Photo taken by Carrie Ann Naumoff.)

At the time we met, Bob and I were both living in the dorms and were both enrolled in an intensive group contract called Revolt In/By Economics.1 I had a wreck of a car—a 1952 Rambler that had been left out in the snow in Minnesota and had rust up both sides—that Bob named Jezebel, which was our main means of transportation in getting around town. Bob named me Duke, which is how I was commonly known for years. He never called me anything else. We would hang out for hours at a local restaurant with a jazz combo, some of them accomplished musicians from the big band era. He and I shared a rundown apartment in downtown Olympia and then moved into a house with two other friends. The two of us were inseparable in those early days. We thought of each other as brothers.
Bob and I were drawn together personally, intellectually, and politically. I had a left upbringing and had been immersed for years in Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, and classical political economy. Bob was attracted to Marxist economics, as well as economics in general. He had been reading Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine since mid-1972. On his way to Evergreen, in 1973, he found a copy of The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism by Monthly Review editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, which had just been published, in an airport bookstore.2 He read it on the plane, and, by the time he arrived in Olympia, he was convinced that it was by far the best political-economic analysis of contemporary capitalism then available. Soon after we met, Bob introduced me to Monthly Review, of which I had only a very slight awareness before.3 Bob and I devoured everything written by Paul A. Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, and the entire MR tradition, along with related Marxist works.
Revolt In/By Economics was an economics immersion group contract, which included at the start about twenty-eight students, with Charles Nisbet as professor-facilitator. We did nothing but economics all day every day for two quarters, with heavy homework assignments at night. We studied both basic economic theory and intermediate micro- and macroeconomics, both Keynesian and monetarist, up to the graduate level, as well as economic history, and Marxist economics. Among the texts that we used in studying Marxist political economy were Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, Howard Sherman’s Radical Political Economy, and Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory—and, of course, we studied Marx.4 Some of the class opted for a less demanding course of study part way through, but among the small group that persisted with the original intensive mode were four students who went on to graduate studies in economics directly or explored political economy within other fields. All four became professors. This included Susan Feiner and Geoff Rothwell in economics, Bob in communication, and me in political science/political economy.5 Bob later would say he majored in economics as an undergraduate (even though Evergreen had no majors). But this actually downplayed, rather than elevated, the full extent of his education in political economy.
At this time, the Vietnam War was still taking place, along with the return of economic crisis in the United States. These things were always on our minds. But a decisive event affecting our thinking was the overthrow in 1973 of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in Chile. Nisbet had done research in Latin America, including Chile, and when the coup—carried out with U.S. support and planning—occurred, twelve of us in Revolt In/By Economics, including Bob and me, organized a national conference called the Northwest Symposium on Chile, which brought in top speakers from the United States and Chile, constituting an extraordinary event. Two of the major speakers, James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin, had written for Monthly Review on Chile. Bob encouraged me to write a series of articles for the campus newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal, on the U.S. role in the coup, as a way of getting the community involved.6 That touched off my writing career. I eventually became business manager of the paper. Bob, however, loved broadcasting and worked at the campus/community radio station across the hall.
After Revolt In/By Economics, Bob and I were both in a group contract, led by history professor Tom Rainey, called Marx and the Third World, in which we did intensive studies of Hegel, Marx, Soviet history and thought, dependency theory, and third world Marxism. Some of the students coming out of Revolt In/By Economics, especially Bob and I, had considerable input in determining the curriculum, under the brilliant guidance of Rainey, who was impressed by our organization of the Chile symposium. The first book we read in class was Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bob and I went up with some others to Seattle to hear Sweezy, who was giving a lecture there in a massive auditorium on his way back from a trip to China. I remember only vaguely what he had to say about China at the time. But when the rest of the audience had departed after his lecture, the Evergreeners all sat down and talked to him at length about U.S. monopoly capitalism and about China. We also went down to Eugene, Oregon, for the Union for Radical Political Economics meetings there in 1975. Magdoff, together with Sweezy, had just published “Banks: Skating on Thin Ice” in Monthly Review and was to be the main speaker.7 However, Magdoff didn’t show due to an illness. Nevertheless, the conference was electrifying. I remember Doug Dowd, another frequent MR author, saying at the time that capitalism was “like a bad compass,” it took you “systematically in the wrong direction.”
Bob served as a teaching assistant in an economics program at Evergreen. He took on that role since he was so advanced in his studies and because there was no graduate program from which to draw teaching assistants. These were heady days, as Bob and I considered ourselves part of a radical movement for change.
However, by the mid-1970s, the spirit of 1968 was already on the wane. I went off to graduate school at York University in Toronto, which was a center for radical studies. Bob moved to Seattle, where he worked as a stringer for United Press International covering sports; became the publisher of a weekly newspaper, the Seattle Sun in 1979–1980; and then became the publisher, in 1979, of The Rocket, a free music and culture magazine emphasizing rock and roll, which started out as a supplement to the Seattle Sun and then soon became an independent publication. The Rocket was honored in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for having engendered and promoted the Seattle rock scene. Bob sold his interest in The Rocket in 1984 to fund his graduate education.
Communication Scholar
As an undergraduate, Bob had planned to pursue graduate studies in economics, following in the footsteps of Sweezy, Baran, and Magdoff. However, he found that the complete dominance of neoclassical economics in nearly all economics departments in the United States—there were only three or four departments that had small coteries of radical economists, and they typically spent the bulk of their time teaching neoclassical theory—made the pursuit of graduate studies in the field “inhospitable.”8 Wanting to stay in Seattle, he entered the graduate program in communication at the University of Washington in 1983. He had taken a couple of communication classes in the department in 1978, and decided that he could engage in critical and interdisciplinary study of the media there. The Department of Communication at the University of Washington had virtually no relation to critical work in the field but had the advantage of being strong in traditional media history and law, as well as in international studies of communication.
At the time that Bob applied to the graduate program at the University of Washington, he hardly knew that a critical tradition in communication—particularly one adopting a political-economic perspective—existed, something he discovered soon after. Mainstream communication thought in the United States operated on the presumption that the media system as it existed under monopoly capitalism was natural and unchangeable to the point that any thought of questioning it was beyond all consideration. As Bob said, it was generally considered as worthless to question the foundations of the U.S. media system as it would be to ask whether the western United States would be different “if the Rocky Mountains did not exist.”9 Experiences in other countries that were in conflict with the U.S. model were deemed irrelevant in the dominant perspective.
However, due to the growth of radical political economy and critical theories in the 1960s and ’70s, this seemingly impregnable mainstream view came to be challenged by a relatively small number of thinkers on the left in the United States and Europe. The two most important pioneers of critical political economy of the media in the United States were Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller, both of whom taught at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Smythe died in 1992 and Schiller around a decade later. But four British political economy of communication theorists were also of distinct importance: Nicholas Garnham, James Curran, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock.10 Welsh socialist Raymond Williams was a commanding New Left presence in cultural studies and communication. Outside of the communication field itself, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman became leaders in the political economy of the media through their rigorous critique of mainstream media practices seen as constituting a de facto “propaganda model.”11 Williams, Chomsky, and Herman all wrote articles for Monthly Review. Finally, Ben Bagdikian, a well-known journalist, published his book Media Monopoly in 1993. Bob, who was naturally aligned with these radical currents within the political economy of communication, found himself in the midst of “an intellectual war zone,” in which such critical scholarship was both harshly rejected by the mainstream and was to be found in the interstices of the U.S. academy at best, while being only slightly more acceptable in Britain.12
If the political economy of the media was the original basis of the critique of the media system in the United States, the growth of Western Marxism, in the form of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School, along with the work of Louis Althusser on ideological-state apparatuses, and the emergence later on of postmodernism—all emanating from Europe—were to increasingly dominate discussions in the critical communication community in the 1980s and 1990s. The political-economy-based critique found itself losing ground within the left, even while it offered the most direct challenge to the dominant media system and its capitalist basis.
Navigating all this while a graduate student in a communication department, where critical views of the media were rarely entertained, was difficult. At one point Bob had contemplated doing a dissertation on Monthly Review as an alternative media organ in the United States.13 He did write a major paper for a history of communications class in his first year of graduate school on “The Monthly Review: 1949–1984,” for which he carried out considerable research, including interviews of the editors.14 Bringing together his seemingly disparate interests in sports, the regime of monopoly capital, and communication history, he did his MA thesis on “Sports, Mass Media and Monopoly Capital: Toward a Reinterpretation of the 1920s and Beyond.” However, he eventually turned his attention to the question of radical reform movements directed against the system of concentrated corporate communications in the United States.
It was generally assumed at the time that the U.S. broadcast system had arisen as naturally and as irresistibly as a tidal wave, with no serious dissension taking place. Doubting this official history, Bob proceeded to search for a period of conflict over the construction of the media system. He discovered that in the 1920s and early ’30s a movement had emerged against the commercialization and corporate domination of radio broadcasting, constituting a serious debate that had been erased from historical memory. His research led him to explore the many individuals involved in this struggle, which included figures like the Veblenite socialist James Rorty, the father of philosopher Richard Rorty.15
The arguments of those opposing a commercial-corporate model for radio in the 1920s and ’30s can be seen as directly related to similar arguments today. Indeed, Bob was to draw on many of the insights of this early twentieth-century movement when he was engaged in the early twenty-first century media revolt. A crucial factor in the defeat of the early broadcast reform movement was that the U.S. newspaper industry, unlike in Britain and some other countries, treated the broadcast industry as their “corporate brethren,” and refused to disseminate information on the reform movement, thus leaving the public uninformed. In addition, the Great Depression undermined the nonprofit broadcasters who were crucial to the media reform movement, further weakening the struggle. Although the broadcast reform movement of the day was defeated, its lack of success partly had to do with a matter of historical timing. The issue was finally “resolved” in the Communications Act of 1934 during the First New Deal Era, which had a conservative, corporatist basis, and thus prior to the great revolt from below of the industrial unions and the beginning of the Second New Deal, during which the left gained considerable power. All this was discussed in Bob’s 1989 dissertation, “The Battle for America’s Ears and Minds: The Debate Over the Control and Structure of American Radio Broadcasting, 1930–1935.” His dissertation was then revised as his monumental first book, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935, published by Oxford University Press in 1993.16 It is clear that this history of a critical debate on the corporate media system, directed at radio broadcasting, was to inspire his own later efforts directed at building a media reform movement for our time aimed at overcoming the extreme commercialization and monopolistic control of communications.
In Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, Bob outlined the long-term factors limiting the broadcast reform movement. He conceptualized this at a more general level in a crucial 1992 article entitled “Off Limits: An Inquiry into the Lack of Debate Over the Ownership, Structure and Control of the Media in U.S. Political Life.” Here he provided three hypotheses as to why any questioning of the structure and control of the advertising supported monopoly-capitalist media system—parading as a system of free speech, free enterprise, and free competition—was seen as off limits at all levels in the society, including communication research itself, and extending to movement activity. First, “the inability to debate the capitalist basis of the media is a function of the general inability to make fundamental criticism of capitalism itself in U.S. political culture.” Second, “corporate media have cultivated, with considerable success, the ideology that the status quo is the only rational media structure for a democratic and freedom-loving society.” Third, “the lack of legitimate debate regarding the ownership, structure, and control of the media in U.S. political life owes much to the nature of the corporate media itself” and its ability to place all such discussions out of bounds.17 This placing of the question of fundamental changes in the system off limits, as Bob later remarked in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, rested on the view, cultivated by all ruling classes throughout history, that “there is no possibility of social change for the better, so it is a notion not even worth pondering, let alone pursuing.” He called this “the biggest lie of them all.”18
During all of these years, Bob and I stayed in close touch, though usually by phone or correspondence, since we lived far apart. In 1985, I moved back to Olympia to take up a visiting professor position teaching political economy at Evergreen and soon after accepted a position as an assistant professor in sociology at University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, where I remained for the remainder of my teaching career. Around this time, Bob met Inger Lisbeth Stole, a Norwegian student taking classes in communication as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. They fell in love and married in 1986. In 1988, the year before he completed his dissertation, Bob and Inger moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where Bob accepted a position as an assistant professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin, and where they were to remain for ten years. They had two daughters Amy (born 1988) and Lucy (born 1995). Inger earned her PhD in the communication department at Madison in 1998, specializing in the history of advertising. Although the geographical distance separating us increased, Bob and I managed to see each other at times. In 1992, we were both in London and visited Marx’s grave together.
The Political Economy of Communication
Bob was hired at the University of Wisconsin at Madison mainly to teach advertising, due to articles he had already written on the subject, and his own extensive experience in advertising as publisher of The Rocket, although he soon branched out into communication as a whole. In the treatment of advertising, he always considered the key work, opening up a critical perspective on the subject, to be Baran and Sweezy’s 1964 “Theses on Advertising,” written for the British Labour Party’s Advertising Commission in 1962. Their report explained the growth of modern advertising in the context of the development of monopoly capital.19
In his decade at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Bob was able to develop his foundational ideas in the political economy of communication. Many of the articles he wrote in this period, beginning in 1989, the year he completed his dissertation, were in Monthly Review, where he was able to write more freely and in his own voice—while no less rigorously—than in mainstream publications. Nevertheless, he also published numerous peer-reviewed articles in top communication journals.
Interwoven in Bob’s analysis was an increasingly sophisticated view of the role of the media in a democracy, which was fundamental to his whole critique of the corporate media system. Here two thinkers played a major role in his thought. Alexander Meiklejohn, whose work on the first amendment as a means for enabling the full participation of the people in democratic governance (not, as it was usually treated in communication studies, as simply a protection for the media), revolutionized Bob’s thinking. C. B. Macpherson, whose treatment of the limits and contradictions of capitalist democracy, particularly his The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, had a similar effect.20 All Bob’s work on communication had the promotion of genuine democracy at its core. It responded critically to the new threats that media concentration and conglomeration in the United States and globally raised with respect to democratic rule. “Democracy,” he wrote, “requires that there be an effective means of political communication, broadly construed, that informs and engages the citizenry, drawing people meaningfully into the polity…. While democracies by definition must respect individual freedoms, these freedoms can only be expressed in a meaningful sense when the citizenry is informed, engaged, and participating.”21
In the 1970s, Global South countries, working through UNESCO, had proposed a New World Information and Communication Order to free themselves from the domination of media from the Global North. However, these efforts were successfully blocked by the North and its multinational media corporations. This was reinforced in the 1980s by neoliberalism and the globalization of commercial, advertising-supported media, operating on a U.S. monopoly capital model. In 1997, Ed Herman and Bob wrote a book on the global struggle for democratic communications: The New Global Media: The Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism.22 They argued that the struggle for media reform needed to be revived on a more radical and global basis and directed at the key problem of media commercialization and concentration, if true alternatives were to be sought. As always, the key was noncommercial and nonprofit media, and state-supported public media in those cases where it facilitated free and open communication and the promotion of democratic values.
By the 1990s, it was clear that a political economy of communication was more important than ever, not simply in the assertion of free speech and democracy in the face of concentrated corporate commercial control, but also, increasingly, for critical analyses of the functioning of the economy as a whole. With the rise of digital technology and the Internet, the communications sector, dominated by high tech, had become the center of capital accumulation, while closely tied to the financialization of capital. At the same time, the public was being force-fed the line that the Internet would lead to free communication, abolishing corporate control and power over the media. Bill Gates, the megabillionaire at the head of Microsoft, promoted the idea of an Internet-based “friction-free capitalism” that would bring into being a true free-market-based democratic order.23 Suddenly, media ownership and control, with the stakes raised, became even more important to both the capitalist class and society as a whole.
In 1997, Bob, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and I brought out a special issue of Monthly Review, turned into a book the following year, entitled Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution. Bob wrote the lead article on “The Political Economy of Global Communication.” His argument, while tracing out the history of the field, focused on two problems dominating the critical juncture of the late 1990s, during the famous high-tech-financial boom of those years.
First, “by the end of the 1980s,” he pronounced, “the wheels had come off U.S. journalism. In the new world of conglomerate capitalism [fed by financialization and the concentration and centralization of capital in the high-tech sector] the goal of the entire media product was to have a direct positive effect on the firm’s earnings statement,” to the point that journalism’s role in serving the public interest was now effectively negated.24 The kind of research that is necessary for real investigative journalism is expensive. The response of the media moguls was to replace journalism with public relations outputs from corporations and government, with the result that journalists were in most cases no longer necessary, and vast reductions in workforces occurred. Salaries for the remaining journalists were reduced. Media consolidation and digitalization reinforced these tendencies, raising the question (today much more a reality) of the end of journalism. In discussing the Internet, Bob warned of a speeding up, not a diminishing, of the monopolization and commercialization of the media in the Internet Age, threatening democracy. Marshall McLuhan’s famous “media is the message” was turning into the media is the monetization.
“Second, the commercial media, advertising, and telecommunication markets themselves,” he observed, “are rapidly globalizing, arguably even more so than the balance of the political economy. Indeed, global media and communication are in some respects the advancing armies of global capitalism.”25
In 1999, Bob and Inger took positions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Bob received an endowed chair, becoming the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication. Inger had already published a number of key articles in Communication Review and was to become a leading critical analyst of the history of advertising and commercial propaganda. In 1999, Bob published his extraordinary book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy with University of Illinois Press, placing the issue of democracy at the center of the transformations then occurring in the entire media system with the rise of the Internet. The book focused on “the corporate media explosion and the corresponding implosion of public life,” posing the “rich media/poor democracy paradox.” It argued for four major structural changes minimally necessary to ensure what could reasonably be referred to as a democratic society, even though such changes would leave the private media system still in the dominant position. These were: (1) building a nonprofit, noncommercial media system; (2) establishing strong public broadcasting; (3) creating a viable structure of media regulation; and (4) enforcing antitrust in the entire communications sector.26 Pioneering public broadcasting journalist Bill Moyers wrote of Bob in relation to this book: “If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book. If Paul Revere were here, he would have spread the word. Thank God we have in Bob McChesney their equal in his love of liberty and his passion to reclaim it from the media giants who treat the conversation of democracy as their private property.” Ralph Nader declared: “Rich Media, Poor Democracy is more than a profound wake-up call; it shames those who do nothing and motivates those who are trying to build a more democratic media that reflects the all-important noncommercial values which forge a rich society.”27
Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine
In 1989, I had become a member of the editorial committee of Monthly Review and a director of the Monthly Review Foundation. Bob and I frequently discussed MR and its doings. In 2000, MR went into a crisis. Its longtime editors Sweezy and Magdoff were ages 90 and 87, respectively, and were finding it difficult to run the magazine. Ellen Meiksins Wood became a coeditor and added force and insight to the magazine, but she departed in 2000 as a result of an internal dispute. Some solution was needed if the magazine were not to fold. Bob and I together were that solution. Neither of us at the time wished to take on the job because we both were full-time professors with heavy loads. Moreover, we were both engaged in major projects: Bob had just published Rich Media, Poor Democracy, and I had just completed Marx’s Ecology.28 Nevertheless, we signed on in April 2000 as coeditors, next to Harry and Paul, due to our deep commitment to the magazine. In the next few years, we poured our energy into it. We revived MR’s political-economic analysis and its critique of imperialism. The first article that we wrote together as coeditors (along with Magdoff) in May 2000, “Working-Class Households and the Burden of Debt,” examined the statistics on the debt of households in the lower income levels—seven years before the onset of the Great Recession—arguing that the U.S. economy was faced with financial instability rooted in increasing working-class household debt, principally mortgages.29 These were years of great productivity. Bob authored and coauthored sixteen articles in MR between 2000 and 2024.
Bob published his major work, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century with Monthly Review Press in 2004.30 A major part of this book was a penetrating analysis of the rise and fall of professional journalism. He argued that for most of the nineteenth century, there was a proliferation of thousands of newspapers in the United States. However, from the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century to the Progressive Age of the early twentieth century, there was an enormous consolidation of capital in the United States with the rise of giant monopolistic firms. This was the case in the newspaper industry as well. With the growth of advertising and the rise of advertising-supported newspapers—a phenomenon attributable to monopoly capitalism itself—commercialism came to dominate the industry, and innumerable populist and socialist publications were wiped out. Even major cities ended up with just one or two newspapers.
In this situation, coupled with the “yellow journalism” of the time, which had undermined the reputation of newspapers, professional journalism came in as the savior. Professional schools would train journalists, and a separation of “church and state” would exist in which owners would not interfere with journalistic content. From the standpoint of democratic theory, journalists safeguarded democracy by fulfilling three functions: (1) as a watchdog of power, (2) ferreting out truth from lies, and (3) providing a wide range of informed input on issues.
In theory, professional journalism would ensure political neutrality and the representation of the views of all segments of society. In reality, the major media organs from newspapers to broadcasting to telecommunications were capitalist institutions. Increasing concentration and centralization of communications and the turning of the media into vehicles of accumulation had the negative effects that (1) the existing system was treated as natural, (2) there was ever greater reliance on official sources as unquestioned information, (3) advertising was ubiquitous and penetrated into content, and (4) media were ever more dependent on the corporate “public relations” industry to manage content. All of this served to undermine professional journalism, marking its rise and fall. The book ended with the “Uprising of 2003,” examining the growth of perhaps the most serious media reform movement in U.S. history.31
Bob’s historical work on The Problem of the Media was complemented by the analysis of other media historians such as Inger Stole and Ben Scott showing how major revolts of the populace over communications, such as the consumer movement emerging in the 1930s that challenged the advertising system, had at times contributed to significant media reform but had generally failed to confront the increasing dominance of corporate control and the capitalist structure and content of the U.S. media system. Inger’s book, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s, was published by University of Illinois in 2006. This was a startling and pioneering look at how the great consumer movement of the time had fought against the growing dominance of advertising and of the related PR industry. She later followed this up with Advertising at War (2012) on the struggle in the 1940s.32
The years in which Bob was coeditor of MR coincided with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2004, Bob and I coedited the book Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire.33 The following year saw the publication of John Nichols and Bob’s New Press book, Tragedy and Farce: How American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy.34
Not long after the death of Sweezy in February 2004, and due to the heavy demands imposed on Bob by the new media reform movement in which he was playing a major role through the founding of Free Press, he reluctantly resigned as a coeditor of Monthly Review. In his letter to MR readers published in the Notes from the Editors in June 2004, he wrote:

        In 2000, I agreed to become coeditor of Monthly Review along with my dear friend John Bellamy Foster. I had been reading MR since mid-1972 when I was a teenager and had been educated, enlightened, and inspired by it, and the work of editors Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. I had introduced John to it soon after I discovered it. By the 1990s I had become a regular contributor to MR. When John and Harry asked me to join them as a coeditor I initially balked. I already had a very full schedule and there was no sign that it would abate. Plus, I was a media historian and critic; not an economist. But John, in particular, insisted that my involvement was necessary to bring MR through a difficult transition editorially and financially. He promised me that he would do most of the work. I agreed with an understanding that I would have to revisit the situation in due time.

        That time has come. MR’s subscriptions are now at the highest level that they have been in more than two decades, and we are in sight of the peak reached in the early 1970s. John Bellamy Foster has kept his promise to me and then some. He, along with Harry and an exceptional editorial committee, have done virtually all of the heavy lifting with respect to editorial labor on the magazine. My own career has veered off into media activism in a manner I did not anticipate in 2000 or 2001. Last year I took what was in effect a leave of absence as editor of the magazine in response to the meteoric rise of the media reform movement and the enormous demands it placed upon me as a political organizer and writer. These demands have only grown over the past year, however, and by 2004 my editorial contribution to MR has become almost nonexistent. As a result, I have ceased to function as an MR editor in anything but name and my initial leave of absence has stretched into a situation that can only be regarded as permanent.

        Accordingly, I will no longer be listed as an editor in the MR staffbox. Yet, my actual labor for the magazine—which throughout has been less that of editing than writing periodically and serving as a member of the MR [Foundation] Board—will remain pretty much the same. Only my title (which will now be designated as a director of the MR Foundation) will change to better reflect what I actually do. In all of this I want to stress that MR is a family and that it remains my family. We are in this together and for the long haul, though my title is changing to reflect my actual contribution. I hope and trust you will continue to join me in supporting MR.35

      Although no longer a coeditor of the magazine, Bob continued to write for MR and Monthly Review Press in the years that followed and remained a director of the Foundation for the rest of his life. In 2006, right-wing influencer David Horowitz published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and listed both Bob and me as two of the “most dangerous professors” in the country. In Bob’s case, the reasons given were his time as editor of Monthly Review, his founding of Free Press, and his role in the media reform movement.36 Bob won many awards over the course of his career, but he was proudest of this designation from the right.
Communication Revolution
It is impossible to capture the full extent of Bob’s efforts during the first two decades of this century. From 2000–2012 he was the host of Media Matters, a long interview program on Sundays from 1:00–2:00 P.M., on WILL-AM radio in Urbana, Illinois, a National Public Radio affiliate. His interviewees encompassed a broad sweep of the left, including such figures as Tariq Ali, Gar Alperovitz, Bill Ayres, Dean Baker, David Barsamian, Max Blumenthal, Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, John Cassidy, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Copps, Roger Ebert, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Engelhardt, Laura Flanders, Thomas Frank, Al Franken, Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, Tom Hayden, Chris Hedges, Seymour Hersch, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Janine Jackson, Sut Jhally, Chalmers Johnson, Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman, Saul Landau, Ralph Nader, John Nichols, Greg Palast, Michael Perelman, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Pollin, Robert Reich, Matt Rothschild, Bernie Sanders, Juliet Schor, Norman Solomon, Joseph Stiglitz, Inger Stole, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Gore Vidal, Mark Weisbrot, Howard Zinn, and many others (including myself). Over the course of his career, Bob made over 1,000 conference presentations and guest lectures, as well as 1,100 radio and television guest appearances, weighted heavily toward the first two decades of this century. He was the subject of some two hundred profiles and guest interviews.
Bob saw the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which replaced the 1934 Communications Act, as a low point for genuine media reform. In the face of the technological changes that were shaping the industry, the new Telecommunications Act was aimed at deregulating the entire communications industry. This was presented as leading to the breakup of monopolies and the development of a freely competitive information highway. Yet, Bob correctly recognized that it would lead to waves of mergers and acquisitions and the rapid acceleration of monopolization in the communications sector. Most discouraging at the time was the fact that, as he emphasized, there was virtually no public debate worthy of being considered as such when the Telecommunications Act was coming into being. The exchanges that took place existed only within the accepted range of legitimate debate, extending all the way from Al Gore, the corporate centrist advocate of the new information highway on the left, to Newt Gingrich, the extreme Reaganite technophile on the right. The news media refrained from presenting the Telecommunications Act as a public policy issue at all, giving it very limited coverage, which was consigned almost entirely to the business pages of newspapers. One could have reasonably concluded from this that a media reform movement in the United States neither existed nor could exist.37
However, at the beginning of this century one of the great revolts from below that punctuate U.S. history occurred in the realm of democratic media reform, which gained enormous ground by 2003, in the context of public opposition to the Iraq War. Bob was at the movement’s forefront. Around the time that the Telecommunications Act was passed, Nichols moved to Madison to take up a position as the editorial page editor of the afternoon daily, the Capital Times. They immediately hit it off. “Nichols,” Bob wrote in Communication Revolution, had “a love of journalism” and “a command of politics, past, present, and future, that was encyclopedic, and, as far as I could tell, unrivaled.” They soon began working together, writing around two dozen articles for The Nation and a string of books. In 2002–2003, the two of them teamed up with Josh Silver to found the Free Press advocacy group in Washington, DC dedicated to media reform. The key organizational strategy for Free Press was developed by Nichols, who suggested modeling their efforts after the environmental movement, which purposely did not take an explicit political party form, but aimed at drawing mass support across the social spectrum, viewing the issue as essentially nonpartisan, or above politics as usual. In the case of media reform, it was approached as a democratic struggle, not a left struggle, though this opened up certain contradictions by placing self-imposed limits on the movement’s critique. Bob and Nichols were invited by Moyers to appear on his PBS program NOW with Bill Moyers in February 2003 for the longest segment in the show’s history up to that time. The result was electrifying. Their book, Our Media, Not Theirs, published by Seven Stories Press in 2002, climbed from five thousand on the Amazon bestseller list to end up in the top ten.38
What led to the mushrooming of a mass movement against media consolidation, emerging almost overnight in 2003, was a Republican Congressional plan to relax or eliminate ownership rules for media and communications in general. Some three million people across the nation sent emails and letters, made phone calls, and signed petitions. Free Press played a strategic role in this movement, but the muscle came from large established democratic pressure groups, such as the Consumer Union, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Media Access Project, and the Consumer Federation of America. Even bigger guns became involved, such as MoveOn.org and Common Cause. The National Rifle Association joined in the fight against the new media ownership rules. Media reform became one of the leading issues in Washington, second perhaps only to the Iraq War. Under enormous political pressure, the Republican-controlled Congress was forced to abandon some of the new media rules, and the federal courts threw out the FCC’s corporate-friendly ownership rules altogether. All this showed what a mass, organized, democratic movement could accomplish. At a time when capital accumulation was increasingly focused on the communications sector, this revolt from below undoubtedly struck fear in the hearts of the media/communications giants and the new tech billionaires.
Bob, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott edited The Future of the Media, published by Seven Stories Press in 2005, with a foreword by Moyers, and including a chapter by Federal Communications Commissioner Copps. This was intended as a how-to-do-it book for the media reform movement. It included as an appendix the “Free Press Media Reform Action Guide.”39
The next big battle was launched by Free Press itself: the battle for net neutrality. In 2006, Free Press rallied the media reform movement around the question of net neutrality, calling it the “First Amendment of the Internet.” Net neutrality would mean that Internet Service Providers would have to treat all net content equally, without creating fast lanes for some content and slow lanes for others based on financial or political criteria. Within months of the launching of Free Press’s campaign, the SavetheInternet.com coalition included hundreds of organizations across the nation, and almost a million individual members. A million people wrote or called their members of Congress to kill the COPE Act of 2006, which would have overhauled the Telecommunications Act of 1996 without net neutrality (common carriage) provisions. The 2015 Open Internet Order of the FCC in the Barack Obama administration was a victory for the net neutrality movement. These victories were overcome, however, when Donald Trump first attained the presidency in 2017, and the Open Internet rules were thrown out. There is no doubt that the mass movement for net neutrality scared the billionaires of Silicon Valley, who shifted sharply to the right, funding the creation of a neofascist alliance between monopolistic tech, finance, and energy capital and the lower-middle class, thus constituting the basis of the Trump regime.40
In the midst of this struggle Bob wrote Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, published by the New Press in 2013, undoubtedly the most penetrating treatment of the Internet and the struggle for democracy that exists today. The core of the book (“The Internet and Capitalism,” published in two parts, chapters 4 and 5), as Bob explained in its preface, was based on an article that the two of us wrote in Monthly Review in March 2011, titled “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism.” But what Bob brought out more fully in his book was how increasing monopoly power was producing a classic cartel in the communications sector centered on economic and political dominance of the Internet by a handful of giant tech players, who increasingly loomed over society.41 In 2013, the same year as Digital Disconnect, Nichols and Bob published Dollarocracy with Nation Books, inducing Naomi Klein to write: “No two people are more dedicated to the transformative, democratizing power of journalism.”42 Having stepped down from Media Matters in 2012, and taking a less active role in Free Press, Bob’s productivity as a writer only seemed to increase.
The most ambitious and the most politically vital attempt of Bob and Nichols to confront the challenges facing the United States was People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy, published in 2016 by Nation Books. The work was replete with charts and data and contained a statistical appendix by R. Jamil Jonna, associate editor of communications and production for Monthly Review. Bernie Sanders wrote of this book that “John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney…call us, as Tom Paine did more than two centuries ago, to turn knowledge into power.”43 No other political work so captured the state of the nation in the period just prior to the first Trump presidential term, backing this with powerful empirical support. Importantly, People Get Ready carried a warning in the form of a detailed treatment of fascism and of its growing threat to the U.S. polity. It made it clear that, as in the past, “a powerful democratic media” is “mandatory” in the United States “to prevent the weakening of democracy and the rise of fascism.”44 In 2017, Bob wrote a foreword to my Monthly Review Press book, Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, in which he extended his initial analysis of the growing neofascist trend in the United States.45
Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century
Bob was what is commonly referred to in the academy as that rare case of a “public intellectual.” In his view, the role of intellectuals within the social science and humanities, as well as, in a somewhat different way, within the natural sciences, was to serve the public. Yet, this has never been the dominant reality in the academy. Indeed, the term public intellectual is applied to only a relatively tiny part of the higher education faculty—and not the part most esteemed within the university system—designating those organic intellectuals, primarily on the left, who defy the deep-seated tendency of academics to remove themselves from the real world. In effect, this dominant ivory tower stance treats the fundamental characteristics of the given society as natural and inviolable.46 Attention then is directed at more discrete and highly abstract issues, or at minor policy adjustments to the existing order. Most scholars thus refrain from publicly challenging the system. For the most part, academics simply write for other academics within a careerist track, engaged in an insular discourse.
In contrast, Bob was inspired early on by Baran’s article, “The Commitment of the Intellectual,” which insisted that the responsibility of the intellectual was “the confrontation of reality with reason.”47 Even though he wrote many peer-reviewed academic articles and presented at numerous academic conferences, his work was always aimed at the broader public and the concrete issues of historical change. He took seriously the young Marx’s notion of “the ruthless criticism of all that exists,” even using this as the basis of the title of an edited volume on U.S. communication history that he did with William S. Solomon in 1993 for the University of Minnesota Press.48 This whole attitude of the radical public intellectual, engaged not simply with theory but also practice, made his existence in the academic world a difficult one.
Nevertheless, Bob understood that the question of the public intellectual posed a contradiction that had two sides, not simply one of the academic disdain for praxis. The pragmatic goal of making change at an immediate tactical level within real politics ran up against its own internal limitations, since it often missed the larger strategic context, or what Baran had called “the longer view.”49 Too often those seeing themselves as devoted simply to practice failed to perceive the wider historical context. It was this historical and political-economic perspective that Bob brought to all of his efforts to construct a new media politics. Ironically, this led to the frequent assessment of him within the media movement—by those who paid little attention to the actual bases of his thought—as remarkably farsighted, even clairvoyant, a modern day Nostradamus. In reality, he brought to bear a theoretical perspective derived from Marx, and modern Marxist political economists, such as Baran and Sweezy, as well as the best of democratic theory.
The clearest manifestation of the historical-materialist method in Bob’s work was his book Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of the Media, published by the New Press in 2008, which was seen as a complementary volume to his The Political Economy of Media, published by Monthly Review Press the following year.50 The two of us had contracted out some time before to do a book on communication theory for The New Press. However, I was unable to fulfill my end of the commitment due to unforeseen events in my life at the time. This turned out to be fortunate in a way, since Bob went on to write in Communication Revolution an extraordinary book that brought together both the various theoretical and historical strands of his analysis and how they were woven into the movement for radical media transformation. Here we have his most straightforward discussions of the impact on his thought of Marx and Baran and Sweezy as well as that of numerous other critical thinkers.51 What he was trying to accomplish in this book was to establish the common theoretical ground that would merge the best critical work of the academy with the best instincts of the movement, bringing the strategic and tactical dimensions of the struggle over communications together for the first time.
It was no mere coincidence that Bob (with the editorial help of Brett Clark, then director of Monthly Review Press) simultaneously put together his book The Political Economy of the Media. It included twenty-three chapters, a considerable number of which were drawn from articles that Bob had written for Monthly Review. If Communication Revolution was a theoretical memoir and methodology on how to work as a public intellectual in the communication field, The Political Economy of Media presented Bob’s concrete intellectual engagements in this respect as they had developed over time in the form of a running critique. It was this work, as right-wing figures like Horowitz, Charlie Kirk’s mentor, realized, that made Bob one of the most “dangerous professors” in the United States. (It should be noted that the role of a public intellectual on the political right, normally designated by the media as that of an official “expert”—defined by Henry Kissinger as someone who expresses the consensus of those in power—has never been considered a liability for the conservative scholars concerned. Such establishment thinkers are not dangerous to the powers that be, but only to the great majority of people that those powers rule.)52
The 2007–2009 Great Financial Crisis/Great Recession was a historical turning point. Suddenly the financial instability hypothesis of left economist Hyman Minsky and the stagnation and financialization thesis of Magdoff and Sweezy, arising from the theory of monopoly capital, began to attract increased mainstream economic attention.53 In 2009, I published The Great Financial Crisis with Fred Magdoff.54 As the Great Recession ended—albeit in the context of a very slow recovery pointing to secular stagnation—Bob and I decided to do a major economic analysis of the whole situation, based on the framework that Baran and Sweezy had introduced in Monopoly Capital, updated for our more global times. This resulted in The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China, published by Monthly Review Press in 2014.55 Most of the book appeared as articles previously published in Monthly Review, although designed expressly for the book. The statistical analysis was done by Jonna in cooperation with me and Bob. Our intention was to show that the conditions of stagnation and financialization were products of the underlying logic of monopoly-finance capital now operating within a global orbit. The key chapter, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” first appeared in the April 2011 issue of Monthly Review (coauthored with Jonna, who worked on the charts in the article, using the data sets). It definitively disproved the ingrained assumption within orthodox economics that monopoly power was not growing in the U.S. economy. This article had an enormous impact on the international political-economic debate at the time, and was referred to favorably in such places as the New York Times and Industry Week. The Economist replicated some of the analysis. Jonna worked with Bob in subsequent work such as People Get Ready, helping with the overall economic and statistical analysis, particularly as related to unemployment.56
Over the years, Bob and I returned again and again to Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, which was at the center of our understanding of the historically specific contradictions of capital in the current era. Monopoly Capital was from its inception an incomplete work. Baran had died in 1964 when the book was still being written. Sweezy decided not to include in the book two chapters that Baran had drafted but had not yet been fully worked out by both authors together. In 2010, I discovered these draft chapters in Baran’s papers. It was decided to publish these chapters in two separate special issues of Monthly Review. The first missing chapter, titled “Some Theoretical Implications,” dealing with the deeper significance of their analysis for economics at the level of value analysis, was published in the July–August 2012 issue of Monthly Review.57 The second missing chapter, drafted by Baran, was on “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications” and raised the question of “the cultural apparatus.” Bob and I wrote a long introduction to the July–August 2013 issue of MR, centered on this second missing chapter, which we titled “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital.” Here we examined the development of the concept of the cultural apparatus within the Marxian tradition, as seen in the work of Bertolt Brecht, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Ralph Milliband, Raymond Williams, C. Wright Mills, and Baran and Sweezy. We saw this as a powerful political-economic critique of the cultural realm that had been lost in subsequent Western Marxism.58
In the following year, a special July–August issue of Monthly Review was published on Surveillance Capitalism, a term coined by Bob and me in our introduction to the issue, titled “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age.”59 The argument was structured around the organic development of surveillance capitalism within the three areas that had been most historically important in the absorption of economic surplus, as understood in Monopoly Capital: the sales effort, military-imperial production, and finance. We put all of this in the context of the increasing digitalization of the economy. The object was to provide a much wider political-economic and historical understanding of the structural changes that had led to the regime of surveillance capitalism in the age of monopoly-finance capital.
Bob and I (with the help at times of Jonna, and of Hannah Holleman, then my MR research assistant, who soon completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Oregon and was hired as an assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College) had been working on and off for a few years on a book that was to address all the major aspects of monopoly capitalism, including such topics as: stagnation/financialization, the sales effort, the imperial-military-industrial complex, the ruling-class state, the penal system, class inequality, race and gender oppression, health, the cultural apparatus, media reform, and the future of democratic communication. Baran and Sweezy’s analysis had never been simply about the economy and the state as such, but had encompassed society as a whole. Our goal was to replicate this in our analysis of the current contradictions of the capital system. We wrote quite a number of pieces spaced out over years, but we kept on pivoting toward other matters (in my case, ongoing ecological debates), and the book did not jell. Bob eventually decided to incorporate four of these cowritten MR articles, and an additional article of his written for MR, together with other work that he had done elsewhere, thereby producing his important book, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, published by Monthly Review Press in 2014.60
In this book, he argued that the political experience and changing conditions in the last two decades showed that the entire social movement struggle in the United States, including the media reform movement, needed a “sharp turn to the left” in the direction of a “post-capitalist democracy,” if it were to succeed at all.61 Trying to work within the accepted boundaries of an increasingly conservative, corporate-dominated monopolistic system, which was fielding ever more extreme right-wing movements, would no longer work in the current juncture, where the most urgent threat was resurgent right-wing reaction. Some of these themes were later taken up by Bob and Nichols in People Get Ready.
Around 2016, Bob suffered from a heart-related illness that forced him to slow down, and hence his intellectual productivity declined at that point. He retired from the University of Illinois in 2020. A silver lining was that he had more time to talk. In the last few years of his life, we met on Zoom for a couple of hours every week or two, exchanging ideas and conversing about world developments. It was during these discussions that I learned about Bob’s Local Journalism Initiative. This was his creative response to the almost complete collapse of journalism, best described by Bob and Nichols in The Death and Life of American Journalism, published by Nation Books in 2010 (with charts and a statistical appendix by Jonna), and by numerous authors in the 2011 New Press book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights, edited by Bob and Victor Pickard.62 Bob’s solution, the Local Journalism Initiative (dealt with in detail in Pickard’s article in this issue), was to have people vote at the local level on a plan that would allocate a small amount of funding to each individual via tax deductions to support the local nonprofit media of their choice. The idea was concretized by Bob and Nichols in their article, “The Local Journalism Initiative: A Proposal to Protect and Extend Democracy,” published in the Columbia Journalism Review in November 2021.63
During our talks, we naturally considered ways the two of us might go forward in response to the growing crises of our time. Our article on “Surveillance Capitalism” and the question of extending the analysis came up several times. But Bob felt strongly that carrying on the work that we had begun with our article on “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital” was the key since it provided a more powerful materialist, political-economic, and cultural analysis seen as a totality. In fact, he intimated that it was particularly important, in his mind, because he had underestimated the scope of the structural problems faced by the media reform movement. Our conversation did not get further than that, however. The next time we talked, the subject was the onset of Bob’s fatal illness. When my wife Carrie Ann Naumoff and I visited Bob and Inger in Madison a few weeks before he died, I asked him about his comments on the cultural apparatus, thinking that he might somehow offer a clue to his thinking. But it was too late.
Bob was very excited about my book on the ancient philosopher Epicurus (the subject of Marx’s dissertation) and Marx, which I completed in summer 2024, and we talked a lot about it while it was being written.64 What sparked his interest the most was the fact that at the center of Epicurus’s philosophy was friendship as the supreme principle. When Inger asked him in his last days how he wanted to be remembered, he said: “as a good friend.” I can attest that Bob was the best friend that one could ever imagine.
Yet, there was something more, beyond mere personal relations for him. Like Epicurus, for whom “the world is my friend,” Bob believed one had to struggle relentlessly on behalf of humanity and the earth, and he strove to move mountains to that end.65 In that sense, he was a genuine hero of our time.
 
Notes
1.        ↩ A group contract at The Evergreen State College is a full-time intensive study program, typically with one faculty member and around twenty-five students, meeting on a seminar basis, aimed at the systematic study—at an intermediate or advanced level—of a distinct theme or field.
2.        ↩ Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
3.        ↩ My father revered Sweezy because of his principled resistance in the McCarthy Era. Monthly Review and the Guardian (New York) were publications that some of us drew on, indirectly, for evidence in high school debate, when arguing over “Should Congress Prohibit Unilateral United States Intervention in Foreign Countries?” a topic that was mainly directed at the Vietnam War. But MR was at best in my peripheral vision, and I had no real knowledge of the magazine and what it stood for until Bob introduced me to it in 1973.
4.        ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966); Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
5.        ↩ See the tribute by Geoffrey Rothwell in this issue.
6.        ↩ John Foster, “History of the Symposium,” Cooper Point Journal (January 21, 1974): 14.
7.        ↩ Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “Banks: Skating on Thin Ice,” Monthly Review 26, no. 9 (February 1975): 1–21.
8.        ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (New York: New Press, 2007), 38.
9.        ↩ McChesney, Communication Revolution, 40.
10.     ↩ See especially Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information (London: Sage, 1990).
11.     ↩ Edward S. Herman, “The Propaganda Model Revisited,” in Capitalism and the Information Age, eds. Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 191–206; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
12.     ↩ Ben Bagdikian, Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); McChesney, Communication Revolution, 40.
13.     ↩ Conversation with Inger Stole.
14.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, “The Monthly Review Story: 1949–1984,” Department of Communication, University of Washington (1984, published on MR Online, 2007), mronline.org.
15.     ↩ Thorstein Veblen is viewed in the Monthly Review tradition, particularly in the work of Sweezy, as a foremost early theorist of monopoly capitalism in the United States. James Rorty had done research on advertising with Veblen, and emerged as a leading critic of the role of advertising, its relation to big capital, and its impact on both the media system and democratic culture. This was integrated with his commitment to socialist environmentalism. Bob and I once examined the Rorty papers in the University of Oregon archives together, and we were fascinated by all the connections in this respect.
16.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
17.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 342–50, 69–70.
18.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois, 1999), 3.
19.     ↩ Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 223–35; McChesney, Communication Revolution, 69–70; Hannah Holleman, Inger L. Stole, John Bellamy Foster, and Robert W. McChesney, “The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review 60, no. 11 (April 2009): 1–23.
20.     ↩ McChesney, Communication Revolution, 67–68, 73–77; C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Alexandre Meiklejohn, Political Freedom (New York: Harper, 1960).
21.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 5–6.
22.     ↩ Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The New Global Media: The Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London: Cassell, 1997).
23.     ↩ See Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster, “Virtual Capitalism,” in eds. McChesney, Wood, and Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age, 59–63.
24.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, “The Political Economy of Global Communications,” in eds. McChesney, Wood, and Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age, 1–26.
25.     ↩ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 23.
26.     ↩ McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 3, 304–14.
27.     ↩ Moyers and Nader endorsements for McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, flyleaf, back cover.
28.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
29.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Harry Magdoff, and Robert W. McChesney, “Working-Class Households and the Burden of Debt,” Monthly Review 52, no. 1 (May 2000): 1–11.
30.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
31.     ↩ McChesney, The Problem of the Media, 58–88.
32.     ↩ Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Inger L. Stole, Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Ben Scott, “Labor’s New Deal for Journalism,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2007).
33.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, eds., Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
34.     ↩ John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Tragedy and Farce: How American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2005).
35.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney in “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 56, no. 2 (June 2004), inside front cover.
36.     ↩ David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America (Washington, DC: Regnery Press, 2006), 180, 260–62.
37.     ↩ McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, 41–44; McChesney, The Problem of the Media, 51–54; McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 206–9.
38.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); McChesney, Communication Revolution, 155.
39.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott, The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).
40.     ↩ Timothy Karr, “Free Press and the History of the Net Neutrality Fight,” January 17, 2024, freepress.net. On the MAGA regime, see John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); John Bellamy Foster, “The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime,” Monthly Review 77, no. 1 (May 2025): 1–24.
41.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2013), xii–xiii, 109–20; John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 10 (March 2011): 1–30.
42.     ↩ John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013). Klein statement on back cover.
43.     ↩ Bernie Sanders, endorsement on the back cover of Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and Citizenless Democracy (New York: Nation Books, 2016).
44.     ↩ McChesney and Nichols, People Get Ready, 39–42, 180.
45.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, foreword in Foster, Trump in the White House, 7–13.
46.     ↩ One of the best books on this subject, which adopted a materialist perspective, influencing Bob and me, and that was notable for its discussion of Monthly Review was Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Acadame (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 134, 176–79.
47.     ↩ Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 3–15, 35.
48.     ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 3, 142; William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney, eds., Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
49.     ↩ Baran, The Longer View.
50.     ↩ McChesney, The Political Economy of the Media.
51.     ↩ McChesney, Communication Revolution, 38, 46–58, 67–71, 80–81. Bob’s treatment of Marx in his book drew on John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Marxism and Communication: Some Preliminary Observations,” presented at the Annual Conference of the Union for Democratic Communications, Eugene, Oregon, October 17, 1999. We had meant to develop this analysis further but did not do so, and it was never published.
52.     ↩ Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York: Norton, 1969), 28.
53.     ↩ See John Cassidy, How Markets Fail (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), 205–27, 216–17, 332–33.
54.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
55.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
56.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 11 (April 2011): 1–39; Nancy Folbre, “Who Rules the Economy?,” New York Times, November 7, 2011; Michael Collins, “Is Manufacturing Industry Consolidation Stifling Competition and Innovation?,” Industry Week, June 3, 2015; Paul Krugman, “Barons of Broadband,” New York Times, February 16, 2014; “Too Much of a Good Thing,” Economist, March 26, 2016; Paul Krugman, “Robber Baron Recessions,” New York Times, April 18, 2016. Jonna was hired as to do much of this research out of Bob’s funds associated with his endowed chair, and had a close relationship with Bob through MR, where Jonna was associate editor for communications and production. He brought to the work a strong background in the critical analysis of unemployment. See R. Jamil Jonna, “Toward a Political-Economic Sociology of Unemployment: Renewing the Classical Reserve Army Perspective,” PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, June 2013.
57.     ↩ Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “Some Theoretical Implications,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 24–59.
58.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 133; Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society,” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 43–64.
59.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 2014): 1–31.
60.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014).
61.     ↩ McChesney, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century, 22, 219.
62.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (New York: Bold Type Books, 2011).
63.     ↩ Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, “The Local Journalism Initiative: A Proposal to Protect and Extend Democracy,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 30, 2021, cjr.org.
64.     ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025).
65.     ↩ Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 141.