On Tuesday, Robert W. McChesney, author of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again, presented the main tenants of his theory to the Boston College community. As well as authoring several books on the role of media in America, McChesney is the co-founder and president of Free Press, a national media reform organization, and also hosts the radio show “Media Matters.”

McChesney began his presentation by introducing a recent Pew research study on the state of news in Baltimore, Maryland. Despite the emergence of online news sources such as blogs and Internet publications, researchers found that 96 percent of news stories came from “old media,” or print sources. But more importantly, they found that the Baltimore Sun had printed 33 percent less stories from 2001 and that 86 percent of the stories came from public relations staffs of corporations and governmental organizations. Furthermore, the increasing number of public relations staff workers and their heightened importance worries McChesney as he believes that organizations will allow news source to see what they want them to see.

After painting the grim picture of the state of American journalism, McChesney set about to answer why. Dismissing the argument that Internet news sources such as blogs were to blame, McChesney hypothesized that news corporations shifted their focus from doing a public service to increasing profit.

Impeding true reform of the American journalism, McChesney argued, are three great myths. McChesney believed that the American beliefs that the government should play no role in the media, that the press must be a business, and that any government subsidy of journalism leads to “Stalin-like” tyranny are blocking the recovery of the media.

First, McChesney set about dismissing the myth that the government should play no role in the media by arguing that the goal of news organizations should not be businesses, but should rather focus on the public good. To prevent news companies from compromising great journalism for more profit, McChesney proposed economic subsidies for journalism like those that the United States spent on news companies before the twentieth-century.

To counter the argument that government subsidization will compromise the freedom of the press, McChesney presented evidence from the organization Freedom House, which ranks the freedom of private press around the world, that showed that the top six countries with the freest press had the top six most government subsidies of news corporations.

McChesney argued that American journalism is undergoing one of the darkest times in the industry’s history. One thousand journalists lose their job every month. Profits continue to sink for print news sources. However, McChesney argued that the United States cannot let the news industry continue to sink to such low depths. “Our whole constitution collapses without [press system],” McChesney said.