Page 23 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

10 Communication, Commerce and Power

application of new communication technologies, this perspective
faded (at least in public) and AT&T and other monopolies were
subjected to widespread attack.
The paradox discussed in Chapter 3 and its implications are
addressed in a foreign policy context in Chapter 4, 'Foreign Commun-
ication Policy and DBS, 1962-1984.' Despite hostile domestic inter-
ests, and the repeated assurances of American state officials, this
period was characterized by the use of DBS by mostly less developed
countries as an issue to facilitate political mobilization against US
power and in efforts to construct a so-called New World Information
and Communication Order (NWICO).
This chapter examines the role that both DBS as an issue and DBS
as a technology played in us foreign communication policy. It argues
that the DBS issue not only played a significant role in mobilizing the
NWICO movement, but this mobilization, in turn, was used by the
Reagan administration as a propaganda vehicle facilitating an assault
on foreign opposition to American and 'free market' capitalist inter-
ests in less developed regions of the world. In the 1980s, the mounting
economic urgency to advance the international free flow of informa-
tion impelled the Reagan White House to entrench the United States
in a 'no-compromise/take-no-prisoners' response to LDC demands.
More importantly, Chapter 4 contextualizes this conflict. It argues
that the early 1980s was a crisis period in US foreign communication
policy. The America-versus-NWICO conflict more fundamentally
reflected efforts to redress the hegemonic crisis involving the radical
restructuring of the domestic and international political economy and,
of necessity, a restructuring of the American state itself. The emerging
importance, at the dawn of a 'post-Fordist' regime of accumulation,
of communication and information activities involved an urgent push
for new and reformed state capabilities and new and reformed inter-
national institutions.
Chapter 5, 'DBS and the Structure of US Policy Making,' pursues
this crisis and transition period in more detail. Through an examina-
tion of the fragmented and largely ad hoc character of American
foreign communication policy, particularly in the 1980s, it argues
that the long-standing influence of predominant private and public
sector vested interests, the divisive and conflictual nature of American
political structures, and the relatively entrenched market positions of
direct broadcasting's prospective competitors, all produced a decidedly
unpromising environment for the domestic application of DBS tech-
nologies. Predictably, every one of the Federal Communications