Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert McChesney

Accountability is the rhetorical battering ram here, repeated until it feels less like a policy preference and more like a moral emergency. McChesney isn’t pleading for “better media” in the abstract; he’s arguing that the broadcasting system is a power center that quietly governs what the public can imagine, argue about, and ultimately demand. The line’s force comes from its inversion of the usual reform script. We’re trained to think you fix politics, then the media follows. McChesney flips it: fix the media, or politics can’t be fixed.

The subtext is structural, not sentimental. “They” signals actors who typically evade scrutiny: corporate owners, regulators, advertisers, and the revolving-door ecosystem that sets incentives while claiming neutrality. “Made accountable” implies the opposite of the industry’s favorite self-description: independent, market-responsive, hands-off. He’s poking at the myth that a commercial broadcasting model naturally produces an informed citizenry. Instead, it produces content optimized for profit, risk-avoidance, and access journalism, which can flatten dissent into spectacle or bury it entirely.

Context matters: McChesney’s work sits in the tradition of media reform critiques that surged alongside telecom deregulation, consolidation, and the slow collapse of local journalism. The claim that it will be “very hard to change anything else” is less hyperbole than diagnosis: when the channels that shape attention and legitimacy are captured, every other fight becomes uphill. You can’t build a healthier democracy on an information system designed to keep viewers consuming rather than organizing.