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Foreign Communication Policy and DBS: 1962-1984 99

Department, the FCC or even a special Presidential appointee, either
to compel the rest of the world to accept free flow over prior-consent
principles or to reform foreign opinions as to the purported benefits of
the former. Not only was no one clearly in charge of US foreign
communication policy; the capacity of American state agencies -
even if temporarily coordinated - to enforce the universal obedience
of free flow principles (assuming they would one day be accepted) did
not exist.
In relation to the crisis facing US hegemony, the struggles outlined
in this chapter reflect the need to control the institutional, organizational
and technological media through which a c()nsensual world order is
generated or maintained. By the middle of the 1980s, American offi-
cials recognized that the conflict between free flow of information and
prior consent, as it had been played out in such international media,
was essentially unresolvable. Neither the reform nor the destruction of
dominant mediators could themselves lead to a stable world in keep-
ing with the needs of ~erging information and communication inter-
ests. A new medium had to be constructed - one that could lead to an
enforceable free flow regime and perhaps even revisions in the cultural
context in which foreign governments make policies affecting infor-
mation and communication commodity developments. The domestic
conditions in which this realization took place are addressed in the
next chapter, which focuses on the agents and structures of US foreign
communication policy in the 1980s.

NOTES
Nandariri Jasentuliyana, 'Direct Satellite Broadcasting and the Third
World,' Columbia Journal of Transnationa/Law, 13 (1974) 68-70.
2 Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1977) p. 222. In fact, after 1945 US officials compelled
Marshall Aid recipients to import set quotas of Hollywood films. Foreign
aid grants often included American state subsidies to LDCs for the
purchase of US books and other mass-media products. The USIA was
established in 1954 in part to stimulate international consumer interest in
a broad range of American exports through its general promotion of a
middle-class American lifestyle. See Tunstall, pp. 223-9, and Robert E.
Elder, The Information Machine, the United States Information Agency
and American Foreign Policy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
1968) p. 36.
3 Elder, The Information Machine, p. 39.
4 Tunstall, The Media Are American, p. 222.