Page 109 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

98 Communication, Commerce and Power

state-corporate interests (as the cultural imperialism paradigm might
suggest), the subsequent ascendancy of the services-as-trade issue was
largely the result of private sector interests fllling a vacuum generated
by what were, for the most part, incidental but contextually inspired
developments. 94
This foreign communication policy crisis, to some extent, was
rooted in the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 and the context
in which this piece of legislation was formulated and applied. The
priority status of US military and technological capacities in relation
to the Soviet Union compelled the rather blinkered construction of
the common carrier-controlled Comsat corporation. 95 The subsequent
role played by AT&T in retarding telesatellite advancements that
threatened its bottom line - including DBS - was facilitated by the
similar terrestrial cable-based interests of European PTTs as expressed
through Intelsat. Beyond the subsequent erection of hurdles and
barriers to DBS, these conditions established AT&T and Comsat as
the de facto leaders of American foreign communication policy. No
public agency was able to challenge this leadership position. As shown
in Chapter 3, the AT&T/Comsat monopoly, followed by the domin-
ant influence of the NAB in broadcasting, blocked the commercial
development of DBS until the 1980s. LDCs, however, had used the
'threat' of DBS as an ideological focal point through which to organ-
ize against the free flow of information and more general Western
communication and information dominance. Contrary to the assump-
tions of Schiller and others, the principal agents shaping US policy
were not proponents of transnational DBS systems. Rather than
LDCs, UNESCO or the ITU, arguably the most formative barrier
to a conscious and/or systemic form of US cultural imperialism were
domestic vested interests and related American state structures. US
agents in charge of international propaganda - officials in the USIA
and CIA - played a supporting or secondary role to the relatively
diplomatic priorities of the State Department and the economic inter-
ests of dominant and emerging corporations.
By the end of the 1970s, the strategic priorities brought forth
through US corporate leadership in new communication and com-
puter technology applications - underlining the growing importance
of forging a secure international regime favoring the free flow of
information - ran up against a formidable barrier. The immediate
barricade was not the resistance of the LDCs through UN organiza-
tions; it was the structural capacities of the American state itself. In
the early 1980s, it was institutionally beyond the abilities of the State