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116 Media, Culture & Society 22(1) democratic and liberal measures of past generations are now considered unrealistic and are being terminated, is it not even more utopian to think the system has room for reform in any meaningful sense? In my view, the only way to exact change will be by honestly assessing the situation and doing battle with those forces that are leading the assault on democracy. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, what we need today is to rekindle reasoned utopianism, the notion that it is the right of the world's people to use their imaginations to construct the media, the economy, the world, within reason to suit their democratically determined needs. (And as Bourdieu, himself, noted in the same address, the place to start should be by getting rid of 'the imperialism that affects cultural production and distribution in particular, via commercial con- straints' [Bourdieu, 1998: 130].) At present there is a tendency to do just the opposite, to avoid the truth because the social system seems impervious to radical change, and speaking the truth to those in power might jeopardize chances at wrangling concessions from them. When we stop speaking the truth to power, we soon stop speaking it to each other, and it is only a matter of time until we stop looking for it, or even recognizing it. This tendency to compromise our vision to accommodate the interests of the powerful – to censor ourselves - ma most dangerous and reactionary idea of them all, and one that we can and must abolish. well be the References Bourdieu, P. (1998) 'A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism', New Left Review 227: 125–30. Carey, J. (1978) 'A Plea for the University Tradition', Journalism Quarterly 55: 846–55. McChesney, R. (1993) Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. McChesney, R. (1999) Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mosco, V. (1996) The Political Economy of Communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schiller, H. (1989) Culture, Inc. New York: Oxford University Press. Robert W. McChesney is Associate Professor at the Institute of Communications Research & Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.