McChesney’s contribution was first published as an introductory chapter in the edited volume entitled Capitalism and the Information Age. In this volume, authors (also those basing their research in areas other than critical communication studies) provided, amongst other things, a critique of the celebratory ideas about the revolutionary potentials of the Internet, the new information and, communication technologies, and of the information society, which supposedly brought about a complete discontinuity with the past. The volume presented an original and sorely needed critical insight into these debates, which often hailed new technologies and social changes. It is worth pointing out that this volume also features two chapters by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. In these they rethink the role of propaganda in society and their own “propaganda model”, which was aggressively (but often baselessly) criticized. Herman’s chapter is dedicated in its entirety to providing a weighty answer to these critiques. McChesney’s contribution, on the other hand, gives an insight into the history of the approach of political economy of communication, embeds the approach in the context of global capitalism (when the full realization about its role in the world context only started to emerge), while also touching upon the key dilemmas of its time that remain relevant to this day (e.g., market liberalization and the corporate ownership of media industries, growth of monopolization, digitalization and the Internet). This is a timely contribution that also demonstrates McChesney’s activist approach and shows how difficult it is for social scientists to forecast what exactly the future will bring.
