ABSTRACT
In his valedictory presidential address, delivered in January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned “against the growing acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the militaryindustrial complex” formed by the increasing integration of military capacity and corporate enterprise, and urged the American people to “never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes” (Yale Law School 2005). Herb Schiller was one of the first commentators to recognize that the postwar information and entertainment industries developing around commercial television, satellite links and computerized data stores were pivotal to future of the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” that Eisenhower had seen as democracy’s last line of defence. The economic, political and cultural centrality of communications arose from three core features. Firstly, monitoring operating environments and coordinating geographically dispersed sites of activity increasingly depended on untrammelled access to state-of-the-art data processing capacity and telecommunications links. Secondly, the mobilization of popular support for corporate and military goals presupposed a mediated culture tilted towards the promotion of compliance and the sidelining of dissent. Thirdly, matching supply to demand required a cultural landscape in which conceptions of citizenship were continually countered by the consumerist vision of personal and collective freedom advanced by advertising and marketing. In a series of books written over
two decades, Herbert Schiller set out to show how these processes were organized and how they combined to undermine a democratic polity anchored in a philosophy of the common good.
