Politics & Power Quote by Robert McChesney

McChesney’s line is less a complaint about “the media” than an indictment of how democracy quietly gets rerouted through paperwork. The phrase “direct result” shuts down the convenient myth that our broadcast landscape is simply what audiences chose or what technology made inevitable. He yanks the spotlight to policy: licensing rules, consolidation decisions, deregulatory bargains, and the slow creep of commercial priorities into what was once argued to be a public resource.

The rhetorical move that stings is the repetition of representation language: “in our name… on our behalf.” It’s the vocabulary of legitimacy, deployed like a legal stamp - and then punctured by the final clause, “without our informed consent.” That’s the subtextual accusation: consent has been manufactured through ignorance. We were technically “represented,” but functionally excluded from the knowledge required to object. It echoes the logic of fine-print governance: decisions made in public procedure but not in public consciousness.

Context matters here. McChesney has long written against the idea that markets naturally produce a healthy press, arguing instead that media systems reflect power: who gets access, who can buy competitors, whose speech is subsidized or policed. His target isn’t only government; it’s the partnership between regulators and corporate incumbents that turns a public trust (the airwaves) into a managed commodity.

The intent is catalytic. By framing today’s radio and television as political outcomes, he invites a political response - not consumer choice, not nostalgia, but participation, scrutiny, and a demand that “the people” mean something beyond a signature on someone else’s agenda.