The Death and Life of American Journalism

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
January 2010     ISBN: 1568586051

Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone.

Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown.

In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation's leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.

"John Nichols and Bob McChesney are the Thomas Paine and Paul Revere of our time. We ignore them at democracy's peril."
—Bill Moyers

"No one seriously denies the extraordinary threat that journalism in America faces today. Nor can anyone serious ignore this extraordinary account of its source and solution. In this beautifully crafted and compelling book, McChesney and Nichols show us that the problem is not just the Internet. Nor is the solution just the Internet. Instead, the real answer to challenges that media face today is the same solution our Framers chose: public support for public media."
—Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School

"The field of journalism is in such profound crisis that it cannot even summon the energy to make a case for its own existence. Nichols and McChesney make that case with great persuasiveness and clarity; indeed no two people are more dedicated to the transformative, democratizing power of journalism not as it is, but as it should be."
—Naomi Klein

"The stakes are huge, the time is now, read this book!"
—Phil Donahue