Issue date: 9/17/08 Section: News

Media critic and expert Robert McChesney speaks about problems involving the media and politics to a full room Tuesday evening in the Physical Sciences building. (Robbie Wroblewski / The Daily Eastern News)

Journalism today is in a state of crisis. It is not a profitable business, so it is being allowed to slip away.

This is the impression Robert McChesney gave to students who attended his lecture on Tuesday night in the Physical Science Building.

McChesney feels the crisis will ruin America.

"The whole system of self-government, constitutional rule, is dependent on an informed public," said McChesney.

McChesney, host of the radio show "Media Matters," and a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, talked about how the media is not doing a good enough job of truly covering political matters and how it is a journalist's job to keep the government in check and the people informed.

The press is understood to be the institutional foundation that people base their political decisions on, McChesney said.

He added he feels the press is letting the people down.

An example he used of how the media ignores some serious cultural issues in America is the prison crisis.

McChesney said the American prison system has 25 percent of the world's prisoners, but we only have about 4 percent of the world population.

These figures are comparable only to Stalin-era Russia and Apartheid-era South Africa, he said. Yet, he said, the media does not cover the situation in any substantive manner.
Few Americans are even aware the crisis exists, and McChesney said the media is to blame.

Non-partisan journalism, known as professional journalism, has only been around for about a century. Before then, one had to read a paper to know what its political affiliation was, McChesney said.

Now, however, journalists are quick to overcompensate by not reporting the truth for fear of seeming too liberal or offending politicians, he said.

McChesney said a double standard exists.

Conservative journalism is rarely criticized for being partisan or unbalanced, but people tend to be much more critical of liberal journalism, he said.

Mathematics professor Charles Delman said he agrees with McChesney's political views. The state of journalism is deplorable, he said.

"It's doing an absolutely terrible job doing any sort of honest reporting or analysis," Delman said.

Delman said he came to the lecture because he thinks there is always something to learn, and it takes time and effort to get informed.

Journalism instructor Dan Hagan opened the lecture by introducing McChesney.
Hagan was responsible for bringing McChesney to campus.

"He was a nationally known figure who was just in Champaign-Urbana," Hagan said of why he invited McChesney to speak at Eastern.

Hagen sent him an e-mail, and he agreed to come, though McChesney rarely travels to speak anymore, Hagan said.

Sarah Ruholl can be reached at 581-7942 or at seruholl2@eiu.edu.

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