Bailing out big brother: media criticism goes from rebelling against media oligarchs to handing them a lifeline.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Culture and Reviews - The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again - Book review

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The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again, by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, Nation Books, $26.95

AT THE DAWN of the new millennium, when the then-successful Internet access company AOL bought out the old-media conglomerate Time Warner, the media historian Robert W. McChesney called it "a violation of any known theory of a free press in a democratic society;' predicting in The American Prospect that the deal would lead to "another round of mergers that should leave the entire realm of communication under the thumbs of a small handful of companies." The one certainty, McChesney said, "is that the eventual course of the Internet--the central nervous system of our era--will be determined by where the most money can be made, regardless of the social and political implications."

McChesney was not just wrong about all of the above. He was spectacularly wrong. The threatened wave of massive mergers never materialized. AOL Time Warner lost a then-record $99 billion in 2002, dropped the "AOL" from its name in 2003, and spun off the Internet company altogether in 2009. Instead of heralding a new age, the merger is now seen as marking the last big burst of irrational exuberance from a long-gone era. And the "eventual course of the Internet" has been determined not by a handful of mustache-twirling profiteers but by millions of frequently anonymous individuals, some seeking profit but most using the simplest of online tools for the sheer bloody hell of it. The social and political implications of bottom-up media have undermined the very media oligarchs McChesney so feared.

This was more than just an outlier prediction at didn't pan out. Most media critics--the people who, year after year, clog the shelves of Barnes & Noble with depressive tomes such as Losing the News, The Vanishing Newspaper, and The News About the News--missed the mark by equally wide margins. Tom Rosenstiel, one of the deans of American media criticism, warned darkly of "the end of an independent press." On his left, Norman Solomon spoke of "new totalitarianisms." New Left media entrepreneur Robert Scheer (an old friend of mine) referred to AOL Time Warner as "Big Brother" and lamented that it was time to "forget the Internet as a wild zone of libertarian freedom." Do you feel more or less free online today, punks?

The 2000s, which stand as arguably the single most disruptive and creative decade for media since the dawn of the William Randolph Hearst/Joseph Pulitzer press baron era, forced what might be called the Media Monopoly wing of journalism criticism--which holds, as argued by the influential 1983 Ben Bagdikian book of the same name, that a dwindling handful of megacompanies own and control the means of journalism production--to change its tune. In a few short years people like McChesney went from bemoaning the democracy-threatening concentration of power at the largest media institutions to lamenting the democracy-threatening job losses at the same companies. The Internet, once considered a dangerously unregulated free-for-all (having been, as McChesney wrote in 2000, "privatized and turned over to Corporate America" with the public getting "nothing in...