Page 20 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

Introduction 7

guidelines to govern transnational broadcasting. This proposal won
the consent of every country except the United States. For many
European and Canadian interests, DBS represented the threat of
further penetration by US mass media into international markets.
For many less developed countries (LDCs) - responding to the
ongoing concentration of telecommunication capabilities in relatively
advanced nation states - a collective resistance to American domin-
ance was formalized in a 1973 declaration drafted at the first Con-
ference of Ministers of Information of Non-Aligned Countries. It
stated that a 'new world communication order' should be organized.
Recognizing that DBS systems could service LDC needs in mass
education, health care and agricultural development, most of these
countries feared that commercial priorities instead would lead to its
use in extending North-South dependency relations.
Given the public nature of this conflict, perhaps it is not surprising
that existing studies of the political-economic history of direct broad-
cast technologies tend to focus on America against 'the world,' or US
interests versus LDC development aspirations. These works are lar-
gely descriptive analyses of the international debates that emerged
through the DBS issue, mainly focusing on the legality and assumed
implications of a successfully applied US free flow of information
policy. More critical scholarly work explicitly or implicitly makes
use of the cultural imperialism paradigm introduced to many by
Herbert I. Schiller in 1969. 14 With few exceptions, however, these
critical efforts, despite the provocative and important issues raised,
suffer from the tendency to make theoretical generalizations based on
political assumptions or inadequate empirical research.
This book is different. It reviews the history of US foreign
communication policy from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s
and focuses on the relationship of the American state to DBS in the
context of the hegemonic crisis facing the US since the early 1970s. Its
approach involves a critical reassessment of the cultural imperialism
paradigm and aspects of work by 'critical' and Gramscian interna-
tional political economists. It shows that in the United States the
corporate proponents of DBS, until recently, have been marginally
situated in terms of their influence on foreign communication policy.
In fact, the media conglomerates that most proponents of the cultural
imperialism paradigm believe were the champions of DBS were, at
various times, altogether opposed to its domestic application, indif-
ferent to its international implementation and intimidated by other
corporate interests to such an extent that some even conspired against