Robert 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. He is also the Executive Director of the Illinois Fellowships in Media and Communication Policy Program and the President and co-founder of Free Press, a national media reform organization. He hosts the Media Matters weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL-AM radio. His academic work concentrates on the history and political economy of communication, emphasizing the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies. He has written or edited eleven books, including: Media and Empire: The United States and Global Communication; The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century; the award-winning Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935; and Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy. He has written some 150 journal articles and book chapters and another 150 newspaper pieces, magazine articles and book reviews. His work appears in twelve languages. In 2001, Adbusters magazine named him one of the Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism. McChesney co-edits, with John Nerone, 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. 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. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in his hometown of Cleveland, credits the founding of The Rocket to the birth of the Seattle rock scene of the late 1980s and 1990s.