Howard Zinn has called Robert McChesney “one of the nation’s most important analysts of the media,” and Mark Crispin Miller describes him as “the greatest of our media historians.” Now McChesney brings both his authoritative analysis and unparalleled historical knowledge to bear on the growing but only fitfully successful field of media criticism and scholarship.

In this sharply argued book, McChesney explains why we are in the midst of a communication revolution that is at the center of twenty-first-century life. Yet this profound juncture is not well understood, in part because our media criticism and media scholarship have not been up to the task. Why is media not at the center of political debate? Why are students of the media considered second-class scholars?

McChesney’s concise history of media studies shows how communication scholarship has grown increasingly irrelevant in recent years, even as media became a decisive issue of our times. Now the burgeoning media reform movement, in which McChesney has been a key player, has made it even more clear that the revolution in communication calls for a transformation in the way we think about media.