AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with the words of Robert McChesney, co-founder of the advocacy group Free Press, tireless defender of media and democracy. He’s died at the age of 72. Bob McChesney was a prolific author of nearly three dozen books on media, democracy and digital rights, including Rich Media, Poor Democracy, a beloved professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He appeared on Democracy Now! multiple times over the years. In a minute, we’ll hear Bob in his own words. But first, John, introduce him to people who did not know Bob McChesney as we remember him.

JOHN NICHOLS: Bob McChesney was one of the great public intellectuals of our era, a scholar who was respected and awarded by Harvard and every other university for his writings and for his thinking, who lectured all over the United States and all over the world. He could have easily lived in the ivory tower. Instead, he chose to become an activist, to take the ideas that he had developed, about the danger of media monopoly, about the importance of protecting a diverse and open and free press, about the need for net neutrality, into the public debate.

And, I think, to greater extent than anyone in the contemporary era, it was Bob McChesney who really introduced people to the idea that media itself could be an issue, that we could debate about whether our media system serves democracy or whether it serves corporate power. He argued that too frequently it serves corporate power and that there is a desperate need for a small-D democratic media in the United States. He loved Democracy Now! because of what it does in that regard, but he also loved independent, grassroots media across this country and the people who advocate for it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, John Nichols wrote the book with Bob McChesney The Death and Life of American Journalism. We’re going to go back in time to 2013, when Juan González and I spoke with Robert McChesney at the Democracy Now! table.

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, I think, when the internet began, and this is — it seems like ancient history now — in the ’80s and ’90s, when we first people became aware of it, it was seen largely as a noncommercial oasis. It was a place where people could go and be equal and be empowered as citizens to take on concentrated economic and political power, to battle propaganda, and there was no advertising, there was no commercialism. That was off-limits. And there was no surveillance. People could do what they wanted and not be tracked. And that was the great democratic vision that started the internet, that Aaron Swartz believe in.

And I think what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is that’s been turned on its head. And I think most people are oblivious to what’s taken place, because the thinking is, “Well, I can still do my thing. I can go to the Democracy Now! website. I can find other cool websites and hang out there. And as long as I can do my own thing and I can text my friends and have a Facebook page, life is good.” But it doesn’t really work that way. What’s been taking place — and I think it’s really crystallized in the last five years — is that on a number of different fronts, extraordinarily large, monopolistic corporations have emerged: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, at the access level; Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, at the application and use level. And these firms have changed the nature of the internet dramatically. And they’ve done it by becoming huge monopolies with immense power.

And what they’re able to do is collect information on us that’s absolutely unbelievable — we have no privacy anymore — and use that information to sell us to advertisers. And then, I think most strikingly, what I get at in the book is that they work closely with the government and the national security state and the military. They really walk hand in hand collecting this information, monitoring people, in ways that by all democratic theory are inimical to a free society.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Bob, one of the things that you raise in your book, that critics of the media, both from the left and the right, have had a blind spot for years of not doing enough of a political-economic analysis of the developments of the various forms of media, and especially the internet. What are some of the main things that you raise, in terms of the political economy of the media, in your book?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, you have to look at the, first of all, access to the internet. And the access to the internet people get in this country is controlled by a cartel, basically, of AT&T, Verizon, with cellphones, and Comcast through cable line. And what we have in this country as a result of that is Americans pay far more for cellphones, they pay far more for broadband wired access, than any other comparable country in the world, and we get much worse service. It has nothing to do with the technology. It has nothing to do with, quote-unquote, “economics.” It has everything to do with corrupt policymaking and the power of these firms. And that gives — that gives them the power to basically try to privatize the internet as much as possible, make it their own, because they know people have no alternative. If you want a cellphone, you don’t have 14 choices; you’ve basically got one or two. And there’s — when you get that big, when you dominate a market as much as an AT&T or Verizon, you’re not really competing like 75 hot dog vendors compete. You have — see much more in common than you do in competition. And so that’s why it’s considered now a cartel.

But that’s just the beginning. Once you get through that bottleneck onto the internet, what we’ve seen is that the internet was promised to be this great engine of economic competition. It was going to spur economic growth, create all these new businesses, huge amounts of job. Remember the term “new economy” from the late '90s? And instead what we've seen is the internet is arguably the biggest generator of monopoly in history. I mean, at every place you look, from Google to Apple to Amazon to Facebook to Twitter, network economics lend themselves in such a way that you get one company that runs the table and no one else really can get a peep in. And these monopolies then generate massive profits, which they use as the basis to create empires — Google going out, Microsoft going out, taking their monopoly money and gobbling up all the other enterprises to build even larger digital empires. …

The way to understand these huge empires — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon — is they’re all like continents of the world. Imagine it’s the late 19th century. They’ve each got a continent — North America, South America, Asia, Africa. And their continent is their gusher monopoly basis, where they’re the monopoly, they get these huge profits. And then they use those profits in order to branch out and take attacks on the other continents to get a bigger chunk of it, because they really know everyone’s out to take over the world, but they’re the only players in the game. If you don’t have a continent, you’re not a player. And what’s happened on the internet, too, is that with the rise of patents that these companies use to basically prevent newcomers from coming in, in addition to network economics, it’s become much more closed off than it was 10 or 15 years ago. A lot of the — Google has been the first to admit: “We could never start Google today; we’d have to go through so many lawsuits just to even get out of our office. It would be unthinkable.”

AMY GOODMAN: What does “net neutrality” mean today?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Net neutrality — in the theory of it or the practice, or both?

AMY GOODMAN: Both.

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, in theory, the idea of net neutrality is it’s an acknowledgment that we have this cartel that controls access to the internet. And because we have this cartel, there’s tremendous incentive for Comcast or AT&T and Verizon to want to basically privatize the internet, say, “We control what you can get — gets on the internet and what doesn’t, if you want to be on our network.” And then they can shake people down for money. It also has immense political power, unimaginable political power. And, you know, this is something that the media reform movement, Free Press, we’ve all organized on this for the last decade to prevent companies from using their monopoly power to be able to censor what gets through on the internet, so we have an open network. Now, if we actually had a public service like a post office system, it wouldn’t be a debate you’d have, because there would be no incentive to censor off dissident voices. Everyone would have access, no questions asked. It’s a huge fight, and it’s a difficult fight, because there’s so much money on the other side. …

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What is the fate of the content providers in this world where basically the people who control the pipes and the search engines and the aggregators are — have the main economic power? What happens to the journalists, the musicians, the artists and those who produce the actual content that people want to access over these systems?

ROBERT McCHESNEY: Sheer unmitigated disaster. And we all know this. Newsrooms now look like plagues. And, you know, the internet is not solely responsible for the collapse of journalism. I think that media consolidation has led to a shrinking of newsrooms, relatively, over the last 25 years. It’s not a new thing. But what the internet has done is it has greatly accelerated it and made it permanent. Right now we’re faced with a dark situation that there’s really no way to make — commercial interests can make money doing journalism, in any significant level. They might be able to do it for elites, business community, in the largest markets. But the notion of having a broad popular commercial journalism, as we understood for the last hundred years as sort of natural, that’s no longer in existence.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert McChesney, speaking in Denver at a media and democracy conference in 2013, a beloved professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He appeared on Democracy Now! many times. You can go to democracynow.org for all interviews. He’s died at the age of 72.

That does it for our show. Happy birthday, Mike Burke!