Page 32 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

20 Communication, Commerce and Power

Because RCA owns NBC, and because RCA owns shares in the state-
established Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat), and so
forth, a self-perpetuating systemic monolith of public and private
sector interests are assumed to be working in imperialistic harmony. 9
The history of DBS and related developments, however, reveals not
just a more complex relationship among these interests, it also sug-
gests that different policy outcomes should sometimes be anticipated.
While, in the 1960s, RCA (which held significant satellite manufactur-
ing interests) had received ·some money from the Department of
Defense to perform preliminary DBS research, NBC, as its terrestrial
broadcaster, had no interest in the domestic competition represented
by direct broadcast applications. And while Comsat officials were
similarly uninterested in DBS-type advancements - largely due to
the potential of direct broadcasting to harm aspects of AT &T's
(Comsat's major shareholder) established telecommunication infra-
structure - American military officials indeed were interested in the
development of any far-reaching and relatively cost-effective
communications technology. With few exceptions, critical analysts of
US foreign communication policy have glossed over such schisms and
their complex implications, and instead have tended to assume that,
because new space satellite technologies will improve the general
international power capacities of the US government and US-based
corporations, they will be developed and implemented. 10
The main point to be made from this trivialization of conflict is that
the cultural imperialism paradigm, if it is to be developed into a means
of accurately assessing US policies and capacities, requires the analyst
to recognize the usually problematic nature of the intra-state, inter-
and intra-corporate, and intra-structural relationships that directly
influence nation-state activities and international developments. The
history of DBS and more general US foreign communication policy
developments reveal cultural imperialism to be an essentially reduc-
tionist, non-dialectical approach to a complex and extraordinarily
important scholarly project.
Complex systemic and incidental factors have directly shaped the
history of US foreign communication policy and DBS- systemic and
incidental factors that serve to clarify and correct these generaliza-
tions. US foreign communication policy has been remarkably un-
coordinated and at times riddled with paradoxes and contradictions.
Rather than a policy field characterized by an ongoing drive to build
overseas markets, US telesatellite policy has been dominated (until
recently) by vested interests associated with AT &T's domestic