Politics & Power Quote by Robert McChesney

McChesney’s line is a rhetorical pry bar: it pops open the comforting myth that “the media” is a natural marketplace of ideas that simply evolved. By calling the system a “direct result” of laws and subsidies, he strips away the industry’s favorite alibi - inevitability - and replaces it with accountability. If policy built it, policy can unbuild it.

The intent is also tactical. “Government” is doing double duty here. In American political talk, the state is often framed as the meddler and the market as the neutral baseline. McChesney flips that script: the market baseline is already engineered. Subsidies (from spectrum allocations to postal rules, tax structures, consolidation-friendly deregulation, public advertising, and indirect supports) are not footnotes; they’re architecture. The subtext is: stop blaming “consumer choice” for consolidation, clickbait incentives, local news collapse, and platform dominance. Those outcomes are downstream from decisions that advantaged certain owners, business models, and distribution channels.

Context matters: McChesney is writing out of a media-reform tradition that treats communications as a public utility problem, not just a content problem. The quote is less about scolding journalists than about widening the target. It suggests that moral appeals to “do better” miss the point if the revenue and ownership structures stay intact. The line also functions as a warning shot to anyone who treats “government involvement” as a contamination. Media has always been a public-private hybrid; the question is whose interests the hybrid serves, and whether democratic needs get a seat at the drafting table.