Robert W. McChesney is Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002 he co-founded, with Dan Schiller, the Illinois Initiative on Global Information and Communication Policy. McChesney also hosts the Media Matters weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL-AM radio. From 1988 to 1998 he was on the Journalism and Mass Communication faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. McChesney earned his Ph.D. in communications at the University of Washington in 1989. His work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies.

McChesney has written or edited eight books, including the award-winning Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (Oxford University Press, 1993), Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (Seven Stories Press, 1997), and, with Edward S. Herman, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (Cassell, 1997). McChesney's most recent books are multiple award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times ( New Press, 2000) and, with John Nichols, Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (Seven Stories Press, 2002). McChesney is presently at work on his ninth and tenth books: with John Bellamy Foster, The Big Picture: Understanding Media and Society Through Political Economy, to be published in 2003 by Monthly Review Press; with Ben Scott, he is editing a book to be published by the New Press in 2003 titled: Freedom of the Press is for Those Who Own One: Radical Democratic Criticism of U.S. Journalism from the Progressive Era to the Present.

McChesney has also written some 120 journal articles and book chapters and another 140 newspaper pieces, magazine articles and book reviews. His work has been translated into ten languages. Since launching his academic career in the late 1980s, McChesney has made some 420 conference presentations and visiting guest lectures as well as more than 550 radio and television appearances. He has been the subject of more than 60 published profiles and interviews. In 2001 Adbusters named him one of the "Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism."

McChesney co-edits the History of Communication Series for the University of Illinois Press, serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and is a research advisor to numerous academic and civic organizations. While teaching at Wisconsin, he was selected as one of the top 100 classroom teachers on the Madison campus. In addition to his academic work, McChesney serves on the Board of Directors for several nonprofit and noncommercial media organizations. In 2001 he was appointed co-editor (along with John Bellamy Foster) of Monthly Review, the independent socialist magazine founded by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman in 1949. Prior to entering graduate school in 1983, McChesney was a sports stringer for UPI, published a weekly newspaper, and in 1979 was the founding publisher of The Rocket, a Seattle-based rock magazine. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in McChesney's hometown of Cleveland, the founding of The Rocket is credited as the birth of the Seattle rock scene of the late 1980s and 1990s.