“In this historic moment,” McChesney tells us, “there is a particularly important role for communication scholars and students to play.” He wants “the field of communication to fundamentally rethink its past, present, and future.” A key purpose of Communication Revolution, after all, is to explain McChesney’s movement for structural media reform, whose aims include “keeping the largest telephone and cable companies from privatizing the Internet,” protecting children from all advertising, creating “super-fast ubiquitous broadband” as “a birthright of all Americans,” and developing “a viable heterogeneous tier of noncommercial and nonprofit media.”

Apart from McChesney’s claims, it’s obligatory to ponder Communication Revolution as performance art, because it is in his rhetoric that he differs from many academic peers. McChesney has reached sufficient lightning-rod status that he often feels the need to explain himself. One bubbling-up of this sort comes in his introduction:

My second problem stared at me every time I looked in the mirror: What to do about myself. What role should I play in the narrative?… But I did not want to write an autobiography or memoir, and this book can in no way be considered as such. The book is not about me, but about the issues addressed herein.

Of course it’s not about him—even if he does later interrupt the text regularly with such asides as, “Whether I liked it or not, people were demanding I address the contemporary situation. And I discovered quickly enough that I liked it.”

His taste for passive-aggressive navel-gazing combines with endless repetition to make much of Communication Revolution tough slogging. Chapter 1 begins:

We are in the midst of a communication and information revolution. Of that there is no doubt. What is uncertain is what type of revolution this will be, how sweeping, and with what effects. Precisely how this communication revolution will unfold and what it will mean for our journalism, our culture, our politics, and our economics are not at all clear.

If you edit copy for a living, you’ll notice that the fourth sentence repeats the third, and the second is either meaningless or false. The whole can be cut to: “We’re in a communication revolution with uncertain effects.” We’re dealing, in short, with a flabbily written book. We now suspend our regularly scheduled nasty review to concentrate on the content McChesney offers to journalists: distilled, analyzed, criticized, and appreciated.

One service is a full-frontal attack on communication for becoming a “second-tier” discipline by abandoning the critical edge toward media industries that communication scholars evinced in the 1920s and ’30s. McChesney quotes Wolfgang Donsbach, a recent president of the International Communication Association, who complains that there’s “too much petty number-crunching” in the field, too many research projects of “little relevance and significance.”

McChesney then offers a travelogue, in Chapter 2, of his own journey through the subfield of the political economy of communication, which allowed him to bring his reading of Marx, and concern with social justice, to the architecture of American media. In his early years as a professor, it struck him that true media criticism had fallen to thinkers outside communication, such as C. Wright Mills and Jürgen Habermas, who kept alive big-picture accounts of media life that did not assume false dichotomies such as commercialized media or state-run dictatorial media. McChesney absorbed media critics from other disciplines, such as Noam Chomsky and the economist Edward Herman, who wrote unconstrained by what he regarded as the phony neutrality of the mainstreamers. Reading Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly in 1986, McChesney explains, provided the epiphany that expanded his growing hostility to the notion among journalists and communication scholars that “the commercial media system was innately democratic and quintessentially American.” Bagdikian showed, he explains, how a commercial media system undermines democracy.

Carlin Romano is the literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer and critic-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.