Page 183 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

162 Critical investigations in political economy

own market power under the sign of national cultural self-determination,
national capital over transnational capital’ (Miller et al. 2005: 80).
The relationship between radical critics of cultural imperialism and these
outcomes is an important but complex one. One key charge is that the CI thesis
framed the problem as the erosion of authentic culture whereby ‘culture is
defined in national terms, within which it is reasonably integrated and homo-
geneous’ (McKay 2004: 71). On the contrary, Dan Schiller, Herbert Schiller’s
son, argues, persuasively in my view, that the radical critics of cultural imperialism
saw culture as in formation; far from assuming an affinity between statist and
popular perspectives they saw the struggle for cultural self-determination as part of
a struggle for revolutionary social change. In Communication and Cultural Domination
(1976: 96), Herbert Schiller draws on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
(1963) and Amilcar Cabral’s writings to advocate a cultural revolution, not
through nativist traditionalism but communications policy reform: ‘National
communications policy making is a generic term for the struggle against cultural
and social domination in all its forms, old and new, exercised from within or
outside the nation’. An appreciation of these tensions is certainly evident too in
Herbert Schiller’s (1976: 9) statement that:

The concept of cultural imperialism today best describes 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 centre of the system.

Yet, Dan Schiller also rightly acknowledges that the response to these contra-
dictions was inadequate; faith in the triumph of popular communication was
exposed as naïve.
Various critiques are bundled together as the ‘cultural imperialism thesis’
often to dispatch them more swiftly, but each needs to be assessed on its merits.
One such is analysis of the links between the ‘military-industrial complex’ and
the media, developed by Hans Enzenberger, Schiller and others, examining the
growth of state-sponsored information and propaganda as part of wider military
and covert operations to secure compliant states. As well as producing commu-
nications directly, the State–Military complex financed and participated in
Hollywood production; President J.F. Kennedy instructed the US Information
Agency to use film and television to propagandise, establishing funding for 226
film centres in 106 countries (Miller et al. 2005: 106–7). More contemporary
links between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the US military and government across
information management and imagery are explored by Rampton and Stauber
(2003). The various forms of US government support for the interests of
TNMCs have also been examined, showing how film and other cultural exports
were regarded as vital as key economic sectors, for their role in encouraging
the consumption of other goods and services, and in contributing to ‘soft