Robert Waterman McChesney Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Robert Waterman McChesney

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

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

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

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

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. — Robert Waterman McChesney

Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications. — Robert Waterman McChesney

The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the "private good" attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective. — Robert Waterman McChesney

In many respects, we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena. In our society, corporations and the wealthy enjoy a power every bit as immense as that assumed to have been enjoyed by the lords and royalty of feudal times. — Robert Waterman McChesney

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

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