Politics & Power Quote by Robert McChesney

McChesney’s line is a neat act of political unmasking: it takes a policy story usually told as neutral “regulation” and reframes it as active market-making with a thumb on the scale. The syntax does the work. “Picked companies” and “gave them monopoly rights” are blunt verbs, refusing the softer language of “licensing” or “allocation.” He’s arguing that the communications marketplace wasn’t born free and later constrained; it was structured from the start by the state, and structured in ways that concentrated power.

The roll call of cities - San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago - isn’t scenery. It’s a map of cultural command centers, a reminder that spectrum policy is never merely technical. Whoever controls the airwaves in those places controls attention, advertising, and the narratives that circulate nationally. McChesney’s subtext: the “public interest” rationale attached to broadcast regulation has often served as a civic-looking wrapper for private consolidation.

The closing contrast lands like a prosecutor’s distinction: “picking the winners” versus “setting the terms.” In theory, a referee sets rules and stays out of the outcome; McChesney says the referee was also an owner handing out trophies. Contextually, he’s writing against the myth that media concentration is just the natural result of competition and consumer choice. It’s the product of early, consequential decisions about scarcity, licensing, and exclusivity - decisions that created durable incumbents and narrowed what counted as “competition” in the first place.