McChesney, R.

(2014),
Critical Studies in Media Communication
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Be Realistic,
Demand the Impossible:
Three Radically Democratic Internet Policies
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Theories

 Multi-step Flow Theory

 The internet requires multiple users receiving and sending
content through and via multiple means

 Uses-and-gratification Theory
 The internet is a new step toward exclusively scratching our
own (and only our own) itches

 Cultivation Theory
 The internet is deeper medium with greater benefit to, and
thus desire from, the individual with access to it
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Goals

 Academic Essay
 based on McChesney work and contemporary research

 Overriding Thesis
 The U.S. “desperately needs” and is ripe for an era of
fundamental reform
 This will come via the internet
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Proposal #1:
End the ISP Cartel

 Maybe it would be better if the

data-pipe infrastructure was
“owned and maintained by the
government, just like the
highways.”
 Vint Cerf, former Google
executive
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Proposal #2:
Treat Monopolies like … Monopolies

 The Network Effect

 Increased reliance on ISPs leave consumers with no alternative

 Increases the likelihood monopolies will not be broken up

 Quasi-celebrity status of the founders and executives

 Redistributing the stranglehold on internet technology

 Put the power of the internet back in the hands of its users, not
its engineers
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Proposal #3:
Treat Journalism Like a Public Good
 “Every Google search … [makes] people oblivious to the actual
information desert we increasingly inhabit.”

 Advertisers no longer seek platforms

 Instead, specific audiences

 Advertisers are now medium-agnostic

 Journalism is just another commercial endeavor in a sea of
available mediums
 Journalism has lost its intrinsic value of being a public good
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Conclusion

 Allow each American the right to distribute

$200/yr ($30 billion) to a “nonprofit medium” of
their choice
 Public subsidies of journalism is present in many of the best
developed countries on earth (because it’s a public good)
 No advertising monies
 Anything produced under the subsidy payments must be
entered into the public domain
 Promote entrepreneurial competition among the firms