PEORIA -- A news release:
Dr. Robert McChesney Lecture: “Will the Last Reporter Turn Out the Light?”
McChesney speaks at 8 p.m. on Tues., October 4, 2011 in the Horowitz Auditorium, CGCC 126.
Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of
Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002 he was the cofounder of Free Press, a national media reform organization –and served as its President until April 2008, and remains on its Board of Directors.
McChesney also hosts the “Media Matters” weekly radio program every
Sunday afternoon on NPR-affiliate WILL-AM radio, the top-rated program in its time slot in the Champaign-Urbana area.
From 1988 to 1998 he was on the Journalism and Mass Communication faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While teaching at Wisconsin, he was selected as one of the top 100 classroom teachers on the Madison campus.
McChesney earned his Ph.D. in communications at the University of Washington in 1989; he was inducted into the UW Department of Communication’s Alumni
Hall of Fame in 2010. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and
capitalist societies.
McChesney co-edits, with John Nerone, the History of Communication Series for the University of Illinois Press. From 2000 to 2004 he served as co-editor of Monthly Review, the independent socialist magazine founded by Paul
Sweezy and Leo Huberman in 1949.
McChesney has written or edited eighteen books. His most recent book, written with John Nichols, is the multiple award-winning The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again (Nation Books, 2011).
His other recent books include: Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights (The New Press, 2011), with Victor Pickard; Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (New Press, 2007); and The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (Monthly Review Press, 2004). Some of McChesney’s other books include: the award-winning
Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (Oxford University Press, 1993) and the multiple award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New Press, 2000).
In 2008, Rich Media, Poor Democracy was awarded the ICA Fellows Book Award, which recognizes books that "have made a substantial contribution to the scholarship of the communication field, as well as the broader rubric of the social sciences, and have stood some test of time."
McChesney has also written some 100 journal articles, 135 book chapters and another 300 newspaper pieces, magazine articles and book reviews. His work has been professionally translated into 28 languages.
Since launching his academic career in the late 1980s, McChesney has made some 800 conference presentations and visiting guest lectures as well as more than 1,000 radio and television guest appearances. He has been the subject of more than 130 published profiles and interviews. In 2008 the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their “50 visionaries who are changing the world.” In 2001 Adbusters Magazine named him one of the “Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism.” In 2006 right-winger David Horowitz included McChesney on his list of the “101 most dangerous professors in America.” In 2010, McChesney received the Dallas Smythe Award, “the highest honor given by the Union for Democratic Communications. It is awarded to researchers and activists who, through their research and/or production work, have made significant contributions to the study and practice of democratic communication.”
Along with John Nichols, McChesney was awarded the U.S. Newspaper Guild’s 2010 Herbert Block Freedom Award; according to the Guild’s Executive Council, “the two of you have done more for press freedom than anyone. Your body of work is second to none. This is a transformative year for journalism. If we're able to chart a course that will preserve what matters, it will be in
large part due to both of you.”
In 2011 McChesney was given the “Communication Research as an Agent of Change ” lifetime achievement award from the International Communication Assn.
Prior to entering graduate school in 1983, McChesney was a sports stringer for UPI, he published a weekly newspaper, and in 1979 was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattlebased rock magazine.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in McChesney's hometown of
Cleveland, the founding of The Rocket is credited as the birth of the Seattle rock scene of the late 1980s and 1990s. In his spare time, McChesney writes about professional basketball for a number of websites. -30--
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