He definitely misunderstands this theory--or willfully mischaracterizes it. I tried to address this in a post last month in response to Tyler Cowen's glowing review of Lizardo's theory:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070219/003529.html
> But what if that's not the point of the cultural aspect of
> imperialism? What if the point is to socialize the top 20% or so of
> nations in the South as well as the top 40% or so of nations in the
> North -- the power elite, the ruling class, and those who serve them
> in administrative, ideological, and other capacities -- into the
> tastes, habits, beliefs, etc. that lead them to think that the best
> thing they can do for their nations is to integrate them into the
> multinational empire led by Washington, even if social costs of doing
> so are high**? In other words, what if the point is globalization of
> the cultural aspects of the class formation described by Kees van der
> Pijl in The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984,
> <http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/atlanticrulingclass/>)?
Thanks for this link--a lot of good writing there--and for free! On the other hand, I'd think that, for that upper 20% in the south, paying to send them for free to US or other western universities usually does the trick more than having /Dallas/ and Coke in their daily lives. On the other hand, having /Dallas/ and Coke around might make Harvard more desireable than it might otherwise have been. (I know that's a very rough argument but I'm still waiting for the coffee to work its magic). On that note, it might also be worth saying that the brain drain the NYT writer you quote is likely bad for the South if the educated people in question are knowledgeable about science or medicine; but, no matter where they land up, I'd say it's bad for everyone if someone from the South gets educated in economics or gets an MBA at Harvard or Chicago. If they stay at home, they get put in charge of the Washington Consensus; if they migrate to the North, they turn into Hernando de Soto: someone from the South who confirms all the ideologies of Northern elites and conveniently can't be argued with (or is at the very least usually unquestioned) since they have the moral authority of being from the South.
> "However, the media imperialism hypothesis has a hard time accounting
> for why -- as shown in Figure 2 -- the majority of low income societie
> (60%) are below the zero point in the y‐axis (that is, they consume
> more domestic popular music than international popular music). 3
> According to the cultural imperialism thesis (Schiller 1991), these
> societies should instead be in thrall of and thus overrun by the
> global American popular culture industry" (p. 16).
I didn't realize he even cited Schiller, but either way he definitely doesn't get the argument. Schiller was never really worried about culture per se. He was recording a concerted effort on the part of US military/industrial, diplomatic and TV/Radio administrators (and sometimes people who were part of more than one of these) to simultaneously promote America as the beacon of freedom and to promote American products (i.e. Coke, Proctor and Gamble stuff, etc.) using other American products (i.e. advertising in between episodes of Dallas or MASH or whatever TV show was being illegally beamed into foriegn airspace by pirate broadcasting stations). The long term goal was to maintain America's political and military hegemony--which is why the Pentagon was involved at all--but the communications and their industrial advertisers were interested in getting on board because it would help prepare a new generation of consumers in the developing world.
One could fault Schiller for not doing enough on the ground research to see how much of this crap actually stuck to the wall, but to say his theory is wrong because people didn't completely buy into US propaganda efforts totally misses the point of his argument--and overlooks the continued use of these methods to try to maintain US hegemony (like the Arab language news station they tried to start to compete with Al Jazeera.) And since much of this was also related to on the ground development programs like the Peace Corps and USAID, it's hard to say which of these were absolutely not useful in cementing US hegemony, whatever their other stated goals (i.e. economic development) might have been.
In short, Schiller is basically arguing, based on a good number of connections, that there was a concerted effort to effect cultural imperialism. Lizardo says he is wrong because this effort failed. This is a non-sequiter in my book. Rightly or wrongly, Schiller is not as concerned with how effective the program of cultural imperialism was (which is what Lizardo looks for) but the evidence of the program's existence. Lizardo (and Cowen and most people who proport to take on the thesis) completely misunderstands this and faults Schiller for evidence that the program was ineffective. As I think I said in the earlier post, this is equivalent to saying that the British Imperialism was ineffective because it failed or that the US going into Iraq wasn't an imperial move because they have been unable to bend the population to its will. Lizardo, Cowen and the lot of them are effectively apologists for the US Empire.
And, on your first note about the 20% of the ruling class of these countries, you are definitely onto something. All of the above--the communcations scholars as well as the people working in international development were inspired by administrative communications scholars like Katz and Lazarsfeld who had very scientific methods of figuring out how to, in the words of Chomsky, "manufacture consent." Their basic premise was that in order to get an idea to permeate into a society it wasn't enough to just project it via mass communication mechanism (it's worth noting that these were the first critics of the propaganda model but they were somewhat cynical since their real goal, working, as they did, for advertisers, was to figure out how to make propaganda more effective.) To get an idea to change a social practice, one had to find the opinion leaders of the community, get them to adopt the practice or ideological outlook and then, based on the endogenous social pressures of the local symbolic economy (I'm throwing in some Bourdieu here: they weren't that French) you could hope for a greater amount of "diffusion of innovations." Mass communication was, in this model, an important environmental factor and it would be legitimated more as previous innovations were adopted and accepted, i.e. as people began to identify less with their local cultural practices and more with those of the society from which the advertising and other forms of PR eminated. At least in principle.
My point is that, whatever the division of labor of the dissemination of ideas, there was certainly the belief that getting the "opinion leaders" (and it doesn't matter in what way they "lead" the opinion, i.e. they might be in the kind of position they are able to actually tell people what they have to think, which really facilitates the diffusion process immensely) to buy in would be essential to legitimating the power base. The most cited germinal source for this theory is Lazarsfeld and Katz, but pollster Elmo Roper also had his own theory of ideas moving in concentric circles outward from the "Great thinkers" (about 0.001% of population) to the "Great Disciples" (about 0.01%) to the Great Dissemenators (about 0.1%) to the "Lesser Dissemenators" (about 10%) to the "Participating Citizens" (about 40%) to the "Politically Inert" (everybody else). The idea here is that the best way to change public opinion (or at the very least, legally acceptable practices) is to change the opinion of the opinion leaders (in Yoshi's estimation the top 20%). This outlook influenced not only the administrative communication model in the domestic sphere, but also in the diffusion of innovations literature which Katz also participated in drafting and which focused on things like getting people in the south to use fertilizer, TV and radios, and so on.
In short, the version of "culture" that Lizardo and Cowen discuss is so narrow as to overlook the failure to consider why people in the South watch TV, produce movies, or listen to recorded music at all. That's something that is just natural: everybody does that. The fact that some of these were (and are) still used as indices of development and are therefore supported by not only US media interests but also by other forms of US political and economic pressures.
Finally, in both cases, Lizardo and Cowen project a fairly ninteenth-century understanding of the way that media operate. They assume that it is about content. Certainly this is important on an ideological level, but, as Dallas Smythe and other Political Economy of Communication scholars have pointed out, as in most capitalist industries, it doesn't really matter what the content is so long as it sells. And many other communication scholars (particularly in the Uses and Gratifications area) figure that watching TV, going to movies and listening to recorded music are all fairly predictable practices once people become accustomed to them. That is, there is a pretty reliable national audience for TV. something like 105 million households. These households (mine included) pretty much turn on the TV at a certain time each day and watch for a certain amount of time. They may flip around to find something they like or they may just have it on in the background while they do other stuff, but the appliance is on regardless of the content. Therefore the real boon is being able to control the pipes that feed into that appliance--especially in commercial TV, where you get points for people having the TV on regardless of if they are making sausage or babies while it flickers behind them. In other words, distribution is more important than production of content because the actual production is of audiences that are sold to advertisers.
The apparent challenge by individual producers (the "you" of "youtube" and TIME magazine just as much as the domestic producers in the South) is not really a long term challenge to the business model so long as the big 6 can install an intellectual property rights regime in their favor. They don't need the Southern audience to listen to Northern artists: they just need to control the distribution system which gets most of the funds from consumers purchases. The same goes for Youtube, Google and other popular portals.
The fact that this is the forefront of big media lobbying and is what they see as the future of their business is wholly absent from Lizardo or Cowen's consideration. Their basic gig is to misread an old theory about media and its relation to imperialism and US hegemony in favor of championing Glenn Reynolds's "Army of Davids" (i.e. the freedom and innovation of the free market.) That anything which gains an audience will be bought and commodified by big media making it a part of the goliath; that the real goal of most bloggers who hack away at the MSM is to create changes in what remains the MSM--i.e. changing an opinion in the MSM remains the goal--seems to be no contradiction. In the end, they are just happy to get seen on TV.
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