The Cultural Arms of the Corporate Establishment: Reflections on the Work of Herb Schiller

Abstract

If New York glitters like gold and has buildings with 500 bars, let me leave it written that they were built from the sweat of the canefields: the banana plantation is a green inferno so that in New York they may drink and dance (Neruda, 1974). Herbert Schiller, who died on January 29, 2000 at the age of 80, was one of the most widely recognized and influential political economists of communication. For four decades he represented the center of gravity in the global debates on cultural imperialism, the power of the media, and many persistent and pervasive themes in international communication. As a leader, scholar, and teacher he strived for a just and fair society and a passionate belief in social justice and social accountability ran through all his writings. Schiller was one of the first analysts to realize that in the late 20th century the Marxist formula for capitalist rule had changed to something at once more pervasive and less visible. The classic Marxist formulation referred to ownership of the means of production. It evolved toward monopoly or conglomerate ownership and eventually to what Bertram Gross described as friendly fascism. Gross (1980) maintained that the governing mechanisms in America were obscured by facades behind which the decisions were made by intricate networks of business cartels working closely with military officers and their own people in civilian government (p. 31). According to Schiller, the new driving force, vanguard of the old, is less visible precisely because it is more pervasive. Does the fish in the ocean know that it is swimming in salt water? Today children are born into a commercial media (mostly television) environment that defines their world and their role in it. Lacking alternative for comparison and judgment, the media-dominated cultural environment seems natural, inevitable, and unalterable. That condition is the prime requirement for ideological control at home and imperial policy abroad. Corporate rule becomes identified with democracy. The citizen is given no alternative vision of the good society. Wealth is extol led, the gap between the rich and the poor widens, and poverty increases unreported and unobserved. At the dawn of the 20th century, Ambrose Bierce (1946) in The Devil's Dictionary defined the corporation as an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility (p. 216). The definition still holds. But near the end of this century, the profits--and grim consequences--of this ingenious device went beyond anything the Bierce could have imagined. A recent study (Hoynes, 1999) of news and public affairs programming by the media watchdog-group FAIR found that the voice of business on television was much louder than all others even on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). More than one-third of all on-camera sources were representatives of corporate America or Wall Street. The 1999 study also indicated that the recent findings almost doubled the percentage found in a similar 1992 study. Schiller (2000, p. 101) observed that corporate influence pervades nearly every aspect of society. From simple things, like our daily diet and the clothes we wear, to matters of larger scale, like the way we communicate with each other. Schiller had foreseen and critiqued all that. He had concluded that the two party system and control of information were inherent in and necessary for the perpetuation of the corporate order. He had lived through the brutality of the Great Depression. In 1929 his father lost his job as a jeweler and was unemployed until 1940, when war production created new jobs. In Living in the Number One Country: Reflections from a Critic of American Empire Schiller (2000) recalled the sense of the period: There was always the money worry ... There were frequent quarrels, most of which had economic origin.... This atmosphere penetrated my being with sadness and resentment. …