Page 30 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

18 Communication, Commerce and Power

without the benefit of rules and norms incorporating the views, inter-
ests, concerns, and aspirations of all States. ' 2
Analyses of DBS developments and more general research on US
foreign communication policy have been directly influenced by this
kind of perspective. In turn, these views have influenced and perhaps
have even limited attempts to specify the role and precise nature the
American state in late-twentieth-century international information
and communication developments. Herbert Schiller, for example,
has portrayed American state policy agents as the instrumental func-
tionaries of both the US military and US-based transnational cor-
porations (TNCs). He argues that new communication technologies,
including DBS, not only were developed and applied to further US
military and commercial influence over other countries, but also that
American public and private sector officials were engaged in a some-
times conscious effort to dominate the world through the exercise of
some form of cultural power. Schiller assumed, for instance, that
America's resistance to restrictions on transnational broadcasting
(namely, its promotion of free flow of information principles) con-
stituted a prime expression of a cultural imperialism strategy. Accord-
ing to Schiller, cultural imperialism is 'the sum of the processes by
which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its
dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes
bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even
promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the
system.' In this effort, the United States is assumed to represent most
3
directly the interests of 'a handful of media conglomerates ... [who]
already dominate the international flow of news, films, magazines, TV
programs, and other items.' 4
Cultural imperialism, according to Schiller, thus has been a
significant component of both America's domestic military-industrial
complex and US imperialism writ large. Primarily through complex
networks of elite relations, Schiller believes that US mass media
export efforts have been part of larger attempts to mute
foreign opposition to American policies and corporate activities.
Mostly military-based research and development funds have subsid-
ized and continue to subsidize private sector manufacturers. To vary-
ing degrees, public and private sector participants in this relationship
have used television and other mass media both to secure foreign
markets and to enhance political-military security by transforming
'publics' into 'consumers.' Advertisers, producers and other mass-
media interests are assumed to have been aware of these American