I see the point you're making. I've never thought of it in quite the terms you've put it here, but I suppose the leftists who most vocally promote the idea of western cultural imperialism in this crude fashion could be attacked for this kind of excuse. I am actually talking about the original set of thesis that are basically part of the political economy of communication paradigm which, on the one hand, says that the capitalist control of the much of the media reinforces a certain cultural outlook that is fairly allergic to open discussions of alternative organizations of society, both because it threatens their organizational structure and because their commercial nature exerts all the pressures you mention below. The argument that Herbert Schiller makes is above and beyond that in that he is looking at government documents and corporate memos and the like which provide evidence of several organizational links and carefully discussed plans to project "the American way of life" in the form of mass media propaganda. In many ways this is hardly a controversial statement any more, which, perhaps, is why most of the critics focus on the argument he isn't making (i.e. saying he's wrong about the blunt causality of propaganda) rather than the one that he is (which is that, whatever their effectiveness, there was a coordinated effort by the US media and foreign policy establishment to project "American values" into other countries, whether they wanted it or not.)
> I think it is a far more complex causal relationship of mutual causality -
> advertisers pickup up popular themes already existing in their target
> audience and gently manipulating and steering them in the desired direction,
> so the audience never ceases to believe that they reflections of their own
> thoughts on TV as opposed to something being broadcasted to them. And that
> indeed is not far away from the truth - good propaganda does reflect what
> people actually think and want to think and only directs it in the desired
> direction. There is far more consensus and far less manipulation in
> propaganda than many media critics on the left want to admit.
This is a fair description of most of the process of the parasitic nature of media, advertising and consumption driven capitalism in the US. I'll note that the argument I think is on the table is more about the use of the US media corporations in the international sphere, but I think that many of the mediating factors you mention are true even on that level.
But the key is that the choice of what advertisers (and the producers of the advertised products) or the media producers pick up isn't some arbitrary choice nor is it the thing many people already like or take part in. It is a strategically chosen and modified to fit within the existing system rather comfortably, co-opting any of the "alternative" intonations but leaving out anything truly counter cultural. Moreover, within the somewhat wider range of products, only a narrow band is promoted, marketed, and mass produced. And, within the wider culture, the institutions doing this promotion have the loudest most visible instruments of promotion.
I don't ascribe to a McChesney and Co. version of denouncing media bigness just because it's big, but to say that, because a good number of people buy this stuff it means that it is objectively the best stuff or even that it had the most potential for popularity is hardly true. In fact, one of my favorite arguments about intellectual property was made by Jeff Tweedy who said that the reason that the music industry doesn't want music to be free is that if it were we'd likely listen to a lot more of it and, in so doing, we'd discover just how much of it is total crap. Perhaps this is idealistic, but either way the bigness of these large corporations makes a simple argument about the free market shaky at best. When this is applied to a global level, the bigness of the US market makes it easy to dump US products at far under what it would cost domestic producers to make similar products. We could argue competitive advantage here or treat movies, as trade lobbyists wanted to, as meriting the same kinds of regulation as a simple phone call, but I don't think that would shore up the problem with
> Then you come with the concept of "cultural imperialism: which again is
> something from the denunciatory repertoire of the left that has little
> analytical value.
I don't know if I am fit to take you on this kind of issue as you're much more ept than I at making these kinds of arguments, but the issue is a combination of a historical argument about how the global market for these products was created--and it was hardly a consumer driven movement--and a structural argument about how a market with monopoly control is hardly competative. I'll admit that there are some critics who take this too far, but the pendulum has been swinging the opposite direction for way too long. The goal of disproving the efficacy of media monopoly has completely missed the fact that the industry is trying to get way ahead of the curve on that one--and the people who work on Intellectual property like Lessig don't have enough of a sense of the earlier argument in media studies to recognize that even the status quo has problems. Finally, the analytical value of the Cultural Imperialism argument, for me, is less about the short term efficacy of the activities of these players on the ground right now than about a long term strategy for hegemony. They may be savvy enough to feed off public displays of culture, but in the end, they want to be the ones profiting from whatever culture is created (hence News Corp's purchase of MySpace, etc.).
The relationship that you describe, i.e. certain cultural
> products achieving dominant position in the natural effect of the market.
> The intense competition among various products force them to the lowest
> common denominator, which is pandering to the most basic human emotions and
> the most widely entrenched cultural stereotypes. Those products that do this
> most effectively - as many US commercial products do - win. End of story.
If you really believe that, then I'm not sure there is much I can do to convince you. I don't agree with the idea that there is actually an intense competition in any cultural product. The exception is the kind of competition Bourdieu points to in his book On Television, which is a competition between, for instance, newscasters to get a tiny scoop on the one overly publicized story of the day: the difference between these newscasts is minute to the outside observer, but the marginal difference means a lot in terms of the symbolic capital within the field of other newscasters. This is even more pronounced in the non-news (sorry, Doug) of celebrity gossip where "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" compete for the "EXCLUSIVE" features of the evening. Thus if consumers of the most widely marketed and distributed media are actually "choosing" between these products, it is a safe bet that there won't be much of a choice at all: if you are consuming at that level, there are a very narrow group of products that these corporations are offering for you to buy.
That people buy them is more of a symbolic ritual, an attempt to be involved in some dominant cultural practice of consumption, than an actual choice which might form the micro-foundation of the market model you propose to interpret this through.
> The concept of cultural imperialism not only does not explain anything new
> in this process, but obscures the fact that all commercial competitive
> markets work like that, whether they are US, French, Islamic or Chinese. US
> cultural products win because they do a better job in pandering to the
> debased popular tastes and instincts than the cultural products of other
> countries. Pandering to Third World anti-Americanism is not science but
> propaganda on a par with that produced by Hollywood.
I feel like you're conflating the domestic and international elements of this argument--and I'm sure at this point, in my answer to you, I've been doing the same. But the point of imperialism is that it is international. And the point of the argument about cultural imperialism, which was explicitly geared at informing the US population about the actions of its government and communications industry, has less to do with anti-Americanism than democratic accountability. And in this case, the focus of Schiller's study was the use of covert tactics to send pirate signals into other countries with the goal of formenting either just basic pro-American beliefs and outlooks in the population, or explicitly advocating the overthrow of another country, often on the basis of propaganda that had a bit less truth value than one might hope. That is Schiller's argument. It may have problems, it may be faulty, it may depend on some utopian system outside the world of realpolitik for its counter argument, but in any case, it doesn't argue all that much about how effective these strategies are (though in later books he points out that the strategies are only being refined to be ever more effective, even as people addressing his thesis ignore his basic premise.)
I think his basic premise is important for historicizing the current global media environment, particularly since it now seems that US media goods are desired by people even outside the official channels of distribution. As these media corporations demand more protection from piracy, it seems to me important to remember the context in which their dominance developed. This context, it seems to me, was one in which the market for the production and distribution of motion pictures, television, and recorded music was aggressively dominated by US corporations, in conjunction with military and state department aid and approval. They sought to control the main resources of the mass media environment and, in many cases, were helped by international aid organizations in fostering the basic infrastructure for that environment to exist. Schiller points out that this was done with the approval of the US government with the explicit goal of fostering a feeling of goodwill towards the USA. Whatever the effects of this ideologically, the structural dominance of the US media is hardly an accident.
At every step, particularly in the last thirty years, when countries that did have domestic industries attempted to protect them, the US cried foul. This brings me to where I really see the issue of cultural imperialism. Because the dominant argument has now become that we should have a "free flow of information" and free market arguments are trumpeted by US media industries as often as the financial sector. None of this admits either the monopoly presence of the US media within that global marketplace (however much it is being challenged by domestic producers) nor does it admit the active intervention of the US state in order to create that environment. This is, ultimately, where there is an importance of content for the dominant theme of the US media throughout the period Schiller examines up till today has always been "freedom." Of course the notion of freedom that they have promoted is one that only the US can authorize and it is defined not only ideologically but in extensive international legal frameworks which now include intellectual property regimes which are necessary to preserve the monopoly market position of the dominant US distributors. The latter will likely be true even if there is a massive upswell of domestic media production in the South.
I can certainly see your argument about pandering to anti-Americanism, and I don't mean to overstate the role or influence of the US in shaping the international regimes of trade and intellectual property rights. But I do think it is important to counter the argument that the US media became dominant simply because they are better at something (whether it is telling a diverse story due to our pluralistic society [a canard of Cowen and others] or, in your estimation, pandering to others) or speak to some kind of universal value that touches everyone in every society the same (one of the industry's claims about itself) or that it was in any way the pure result of the market logic that they are now asking others to accept. I don't think it is propagandistic to draw some attention to the history of how the current media environment was shaped--largely because I think it makes it more acceptable for individual nations to make their own choice about how they will try to manage their media environment. At the very least, the idea of having some state intervention on the domestic level should at least be seen in the light of the state intervention that existed on the international level up to this point and we should be able to point out that, while the US media may be fairly powerful in terms of their market presence, their inability to exploit every market in the world equally is hardly the same thing as "freedom" much less freedom of speech. Property rights are a whole other issue but are being promoted with the same fervor.
Whether any of this passes the smell test for you of actually qualifying as a form of imperialism seems, to some extent, on whether you believe that the free market exists as a naturally occurring phenomenon or whether it is something that has to be systematically imposed and carefully enforced, often with the threat of military or financial intervention. And, for me, the fact that for it to function, it requires a deep change in the basic expectations and normal social practices as well as the role of the state, makes the imposition of this model a form of "cultural imperialism" par excellance. That the argument made from the beginning is that any attempt to shape this model made by social actors other than those consecrated by the values of the market will catastrophically impair its functioning seems to me to be the hallmark of the brand of freedom it actually proscribes. Though the media itself may not have this ideological effect (as was originally intended) on the international level, the industry lobbyists are ever more involved in drafting legislation that is associated with projecting this ideology into the legal instruments of other states.
I'm not sure if that makes it any clearer, but it is the way I see the argument about cultural imperialism as being of continued historical (if not analytical) relevance, even if some of the function of the dominant actors and the institutions they control has changed.
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