Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

Sophisticated critical analyses of the corporate takeover of communication are not easy to come by.This makes McChesney's rigourous and carefully argued scholarship an especially welcome contribution to the literature.This book is of a piece with his earlier Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (1997); The Global Media, which he co-authored with Edward Herman (1997); and the co-edited collection Capitalism and the Information Age (1998).In Rich Media, Poor Democracy, McChesney argues that the U.S.'s "hypercommercial" corporate media-system contradicts the communication requirements of a healthy democracy, and he insists that structural reform of the media must be part of a broader movement to democratize the core institutions of society: "I argue in this book that the media have become a significant anti-democratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, world-wide.The wealthier and more powerful the corporate media giants have become, the poorer the prospects for participatory democracy" (p.2).While the book deals primarily with the relationship between the media and the state of American democracy, McChesney's argument has much wider application as media corporations globalize and "neoliberal democracy" spreads.His argument is particularly pertinent to Canada, where companies like CanWest Global, Quebecor, and Rogers Communications are restructuring the Canadian mediascape and where public debate is too often reduced to issues such as whether Izzy Asper will be a more benevolent monopolist than Conrad Black.McChesney's depiction of the media system as increasingly concentrated, conglomerated, and vertically integrated, driven by profit and supported by advertising, is not particularly new.What is refreshing about the book is the analysis he brings to the topic, an analysis characterized by his willingness, first, to engage with a number of the powerful myths which sustain the corporate media-structure and, second, to broaden considerably the debate around media ownership."In view of the extraordinary importance of media and communication in our society, I believe that the subject of how the media are controlled, structured, and subsidized should be at the center of democratic debate.Instead, this subject is nowhere to be found" (pp.6-7).McChesney advocates open and broad public discussion of media ownership, discussion which must be informed by a sense of media history and shorn of economic dogma.The book is divided into two parts of three chapters each.Part I, simply titled "Politics," offers an overview of the U.S. and global media systems, and a structural analysis.Here McChesney seeks to debunk two media myths.First, he rejects the popular notion that applying market principles to communication assures that people get what they want: "As much as demand creates supply, supply creates demand.Media conglomerates are risk-averse and continually return to what has been commercially successful in the past" (pp.32-33).Second, he devotes an entire chapter to the idea that new communication technologies, and

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