Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols

About the author: Robert W. McChesney has written several books on the mass media and democracy and is a research professor at the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John Nichols is Washington correspondent to the Nation and the recipient of the Clarion Award for newspaper column writing.

Every day, media consumers are titillated, terrified, and manipulated by reports of celebrity sex scandals, brutal murders, and other engaging news known as "infotainment." Important political issues concerning the American public, however, are ignored or marginalized. Instead of investigating the honesty of politicians, news sources often parrot government pronouncements in order to curry favor with officials who have the power to regulate the media. This media bias benefits the wealthy...