Our Media, Not Theirs! The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media examines how the current media system in the United States undermines democracy, and what we can do to change it. Robert McChesney and John Nichols begin by detailing how the media system has come to be dominated by a handful of transnational conglomerates that use their immense political and economic power to saturate the population with commercial messages. They reveal how journalism, electoral politics, entertainment, art and culture have all suffered as a result, and use examples of media coverage of the 2000 Presidential Elections and the War On Terror to illustrate the poverty of information corporate media actually provide. McChesney and Nichols also explain how the Internet, which many once argued would open up the media system to a cornucopia of new voices and creativity, has been lost for the most part to the corporate communication system.
Our Media, Not Theirs! contains proposals for making our media system more responsive to the needs of the citizenry and less dominated by corporate greed. The authors look at how political parties, grassroots movements and popular performers in other democratic nations increasingly have made media reform a political priority. The authors provide an analysis of the burgeoning media reform activities in the United States, and outline ways we can structurally change the media system through coalition work and movement-building. McChesney and Nichols go on to provide readers with the tools to battle for a better media. They offer an invaluable analysis, and clear ways to fight back against corporate domination of democracy.
Celebrating 40 Years of Project Censored
Did you know that the U.S. military is deployed in 70% of the world's nations? Or that leaked State Deptartment cables show that the U.S. planned to instigate civil strife in Syria as early in 2006? What about the chronic problem of medical neglect in private, for-profit, U.S. immigrant-only jails?
No? Neither did the rest of the world. That's because these and countless other news items are suppressed or ignored by our nation's "free press" every day. For the past forty years, Project Censored has been unearthing the buried stories that corporate media deem unfit to print. They also just hosted a jam-packed Media Freedom Summit and co-founded the Global Critical Media Literacy Project in partnership with the Action Coalition for Media Education and the graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart University.
To celebrate, we're showcasing Censored 2017 at a 25% off online discount and offering 50% off Censored backlist titles (from Censored 1996 to Censored 2006), along with select Seven Stoires books on media literacy, including titles by Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky.
Check out our discounted Project Censored and media literacy collection!
A longtime media analyst and critic of capitalism, Robert McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, he co-founded the Free Press, a media reform organization, and acted as its president until 2008. McChesney lives in Illinois.
