Page 216 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

206 Communication, Commerce and Power

imaginable. In other words, the multiple and ever-changing mediators
of the international political economy directly shape what is perhaps the
essential concern of both Cox and Schiller - how consent is constructed,
maintained and destroyed.
Historic periods of disturbance or crisis usually compel the devel-
opment of new or reformed media. The implicit and/or explicit pur-
pose of some constructions or reforms is to create greater flexibility
and/or stability for a ruling class or hegemonic bloc. These attempts
often involve the use of vanous media to control territory and the
people in it (control over space) and the maintenance of this control
(control over time). The capacity to control space and time and the
capacity to challenge hegemonic dominance involves the use of such
media to undermine or accommodate critical thought. This is the
essence of the cultural concerns implicit in this book: it is the essence
of cultural imperialism and the construction of consent or its absence.
Hegemonic rule involves more than the willingness of people to be
ruled. It also involves the building and maintenance of 'the conditions
for that willingness to be present.' 14 Both the construction or reform
of key mediators in the international political economy thus constitute
the necessary precondition for hegemonic rule - rule involving the
capacity to compromise with counter-hegemonic forces in ways that
will reinforce the naturalness of a favored world order. Without such
media, a consensual hegemonic order would be impossible.
The hegemonic crisis facing America and the Fordist regime of
accumulation, dating from the early 1970s, has involved conflicts
among inter-and intra-class forces in the United States and challenges
involving such media. Institutions such as international law, the
structure and raison d'etre of organizations like the ITU and chal-
lenges over the implementation of technologies like DBS, reflected
and shaped the history of this struggle.
A central goal in such efforts to reform or restructure international
media involves more than an attempt to influence what is on 'the
agenda' or what kind of information will be produced and made
available. More fundamentally, control over such media involves the
shaping of conceptual systems through which elites and masses con-
struct conciousness, and central to this process are the individual and
cultural biases that such structures facilitate. For example, in the
1970s and 1980s, in the context of economic crisis and American
hegemonic decline, the structural characteristics of the ITU facilitated
the overtly 'political' concerns of less developed countries involving
redistribution issues. From the perspective of particular US interests,