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Robert W. McChesney ur era rests upon a massive paradox. On the one hand, it is an age of dazzling breakthroughs in communication and information technologies. Communication is so intertwined with the economy and culture that our times have been dubbed the Information Age. Sitting high atop this golden web are a handful of enormous media firms—exceeding by a factor of 10 the size of the largest media firms of just 15 years earlier—that have established global empires and generated massive riches providing news and entertainment to the peoples of the world.1 Independent of government control, this commercial media juggernaut provides a bounty of choices unimaginable a generation or two ago. And it is finding a welcoming audience. According to one study, the average American consumed a whopping 11.8 hours of media per day in 1998, up over 13% in just three years. As the survey director noted, “the sheer amount of media products and messages consumed by the average American adult is staggering and growing.”2 The rise of the Internet has only accentuated the trend. Although some research suggests that the Internet is replacing some of the time people have spent with other media, other research suggests its more important effect is simply to expand the role of media in people’s lives.3 “People are simply spending more time with media,” one media executive stated. They don’t appear to have dropped one medium to have picked up another.”4 On the other hand, our era is increasingly depoliticized; traditional notions of civic and political involvement have shriveled. Elementary understanding of social and political affairs has declined. Turnout for U.S. elections—admittedly not a perfect barometer—has plummeted over the past 30 years. The 1998 congressional elections had one of the lowest turnouts of eligible voters in national elections in U.S. history, as just over one-third of the eligible voters turned out on election day.5 It is, to employ a phrase coined by Robert Entman, “democracy without citizens.” 6 By conventional reasoning, this is nonsensical. A flowering commercial marketplace of ideas, unencumbered by government censorship or regulation, should generate the most stimulating democratic political culture possible. The response comes that the problem lies elsewhere, that “the people” obviously are not interested in politics or civic issues, because, if they were, it would be in the interests of the wealthy media giants to provide them with such fare. There is an element of truth to that reply, but it is hardly a satisfactory response. Virtually all defenses of the commercial media system