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In Mass Communications and American Empire and a body of related writings produced across a long career, Schiller spoke of the relations of the mass media system of radio, television, and newspapers to its audience. He analyzed the structure of the “communications-military-industrial coalition,” dominated by a handful of companies whose ownership was becoming more and more concentrated. “If monolithic corporate enterprises command the informational apparatus, this is in keeping with the distribution of power in the economy at large.”¹⁰⁰

Says Schiller, “The industries that serve as the sites for the creation, packaging, and transmission of cultural messages – corporate ones especially – have grown greatly as their importance and centrality to the corporate economy increases.” They also have evolved to “require gargantuan capital requirements for entry.”¹⁰¹

From their position of power, the “mass media … instruct their audiences … governed confidently by a propertied-managerial corps … organized by an extremely concentrated group of commercial commanders.” Their ideological messages are dominated by the interests of the capitalist class, aligned with the administrative-military state.¹⁰² The outcome is “powerful, social conditioning machinery – the outpourings of the ‘leisure-entertainment’ conglomerates.”¹⁰³

In the second half of the twentieth century, Schiller goes on to argue, the communications-media complex aggressively extended its sway across the whole world. If geographical colonialism was no longer feasible in the postcolonial world, global domination of mass communications had to become the standard bearer of a new colonialism, that of free-market capitalism. Its neoimperial mission was to proselytize. This was in a context where one-quarter of the world’s population had already fallen to communism, Vietnam was still slowly falling, and other parts of the “third world” were aflame with communist-aligned insurgencies.¹⁰⁴

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¹⁰⁰ Herbert I. Schiller, 1971, Mass Communications and American Empire, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 54, 149.

¹⁰¹ Herbert I. Schiller, 1989, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 130, 36.

¹⁰² Herbert I. Schiller, 1971, Mass Communications and American Empire, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, p. 2.

¹⁰³ Herbert I. Schiller, 1981, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500, Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, p. 176.

¹⁰⁴ Herbert I. Schiller, 2000a, Living in the Number One Country: Reflections from a Critic of American Empire, New York: Seven Stories Press.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 218–219. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Herbert Schiller’s “Mass Communications” §AS2.2e