international comm

The Role of Mass Media in U.S. Imperialism

ROBERT CHRISMAN

This address was delivered by Robert Chrisman at the conference "The Dialogue of the Americas," September 9-13, 1982, Mexico City. The Dialogue was dedicated to improving communications between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking intellectuals in the Western Hemisphere. Over 500 delegates and observers were in attendance, including a large multiracial contingent from the U.S. Held in the Mu- seum of Anthropology in Mexico City, the Dialogue was a continuation of the historic conference held in Havana, Cuba, in Sep- tember 1981, the "Meeting of Intellectuals for the Sovereignty of Our America." The Mexico City Dialogue was implemented by the Standing Committee of Intellectuals for the Sovereignty of the Peoples of Our America, composed of Mario Benedetti, Juan Bosch, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Ernesto Cardenal, Suzy Castor, Julio Cortá- zar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Gonza- les Casanova, Georgia Lamming, Roberto Matta, Miguel Otero Silva and Mariano Rodriguez.

Jaime Labastida was head of the MexicanCommittee for the Dialogue of the Ameri- cas, which was the host for the Dialogue. Ex- tensive media coverage was given to this Di- alogue in the national press of Mexico, and

Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 14, No. 3/4, A Dialogue

on Culture (Summer 1983), pp. 13-17.

internationally. Informed by the theme "the sovereignty of the peoples/' panels were conducted on ideological debate in the Americas, the situation of the intellectuals in the Americas, the problem of nationalities, mass media, unity and difference among the Americas, common concerns of intellectuals in the Americas, and ideas and responses.

This most important Dialogue comes at a time when minority people of the U.S.A. are struggling to maintain sovereignty, dig- nity and humanity in the face of crunching economic blows and revived racism. In this respect we have deep empathy for the em- battled peoples of Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba, and the many other nations of Nuestra America who struggle for their sovereignty, though they might not at this moment to be in the throes of the hurri- cane. Two powerful events in the past month have served notice that the peoples of Our America will protect their sovereignty: the nationalization of banks by Mexico, and Cuba's recent broadcast to the U.S., which served to show the U.S. that Cuba has the means and will to protect its radio space from intrusion by the so-called Radio Marti.

There is an interrelationship between the rise of U.S. imperialism in the late nine- teenth century and the growth of U.S. mass media, in all its forms. The modern charac- teristics of news media—to inform, to pro- pagandize and to create consumers—grew out of the continued growth and expansion of the U.S. economy. Now saturation tech- niques are perfected that literally bombard the senses, often with more stimuli than they can handle. Let us consider, for example, the growth of newspapers in the U.S. From 1880 through 1910, newspapers grew from

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3 million to 22.5 million in circulation. One key statistic is that in 1883 we have the first year that advertising exceeded circulation as a source of income.^ This fact signals the emergence of news media as a form of ad- vertising and marketing. The pattern of us- ing news media to foment imperialist ac- tion was also set during this period, most famously by the scandalous campaign of the Hearst newspaper chain to have the U.S. intervene in Cuba's war of independence of 1895. Furthermore, the agitation of media surrounding the explosion of the battleship Maine was a harbinger of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, where the U.S. media served to fabricate and inflame a fantasy.

Radio reveals a similar growth pattern. Between 1922 and 1925, radio grew from 400,000 sets to 4 million. And later, the number of televisions jumped from 10,000 in 1945 to lO million in 1949.^ This is not only a prodigious expansion of media and its ability to saturate consciousness, but it also demonstrates huge economic growth.

Because the mass media has esthetic quality, we tend to overlook the extent to which mass media is a huge business. But when examined, giant U.S. media compa- nies manifest the familiar pattern of mo- nopolies sustained by finance capital. Not surprisingly, then, banks have dominant ownership in the three major U.S. national TV companies, ABC, CBS and NBC. "Eleven banks have voting rights to 38. 1 percent of the common stock in CBS. Eight banks have voting rights to 34.1 percent of the common stock in ABC. Chase Manhattan and Bankers Trust together have voting rights to 19.8 per- cent of the stock in CBS and 17.4 percent of the stock of ABC. To summarize, banks and

other financial institutions control 65 per- cent of the voting shares of ABC, 30 percent of the voting shares of NBC and 7 percent of the voting shares of CBS."̂

To give you some idea of the scale, the size of the television giants, consider the fol- lowing statistics. ABC TV network has 168 affiliates, 5 TV stations, 4 ABC radio net- works, with 1,254 affiliates. It is the largest motion picture distribution chain, owning over 434 Paramount Theatres. ABC Interna- tional has controlling interests in 16 foreign companies operating television stations in 26 countries and ABC World division di- rectly owns 64 foreign television stations. And NBC, which is jointly controlled by the Rockefeller and Morgan finance groups. RCA owns all of NBC and is one of the 20 largest corporations in the world. In addi- tion, RCA also owns Random House Pub- lishers, RCA Records, .Hertz Rent-a-Car. Its more than 60 factories produce some 1,200 products, and RCA is a leading supplier of electronic equipment for military and po- lice. Sixty percent of all newspaper space, 52 percent of all magazine space, 25 per- cent of all radio air time and 22 percent of all TV air time is taken up by advertising. In 1968, newspaper, radio and TV ads brought in $10.8 billion."

We are also familiar with the range and thrust of U.S. mass media in Nuestra Amer- ica. In his address to the "Meeting of Intel- lectuals," Havana, Cuba, September 1981, Armando Hart, Minister of Culture of Cuba, informed us that 70 percent of the television programming of South America is supplied by the U.S., at the same time the illiterate population over 15 years of age amounts to more than 40 million people with about 1

Robert Chrisman The Role ot Mass Media in U.S. Imperialism 57

out of every 4 people in South America be- ing without the most basic literacy.

U.S. mass media is a goliath of frightening proportions, and a powerful instrument in the process of suppressing the sovereignty of peoples throughout their nations. In this process, of course, it also violates one of the most fundamental of human rights: the right to a clear and informed consciousness, the right to develop and enhance cultural life. It is precisely our capacity as human beings to record our ideas, experiences and emotions in symbolic form that permits the richness of human life. Not only is fact recorded, but in the artistic mediums, emotions, ideas and passions are expressed and cleansed as we objectify our feelings and grow as persons in this process. Tragically, some of the most dis- tinguished creative and academic talent in the United States is used to create advertis- ing jingles and images. Great jazz and blues singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles are used to sing the praises of Kentucky Fried Chicken and other such products.

But while we do indeed have a Goliath, we also are aware of the limits of the effec- tiveness of mass media, and the resources that the peoples of the U.S. and Nuestra America have to struggle against its negative effects.

The primary function of this mass media is to create false consciousness within its audiences, to stimulate the hunger for mer- chandise that is not needed and to glamor- ize the consumer life style. Information and esthetic function is secondary. This leads in- evitably to the alienation and the frustration of the audiences. Art and culture are viewed

as commodities, and the human being is an object that is deliberately, willfully and sci- entifically stimulated to perform in certain ways.

Such an approach ignores the reality of events, it ignores the social cohesion of people and their values of their communities and nations, values that derive from shared real experience—such as working together, building families and communities and ba- sic elements of life.

Even in a country as complex as the U.S., this fallacy is apparent. The publishing mo- nopoly, which is centered in New York, is un- dergoing a financial crisis. Originally a form of patriarchal capitalism and regarded as a gentleman's profession, the publishing indus- try is being purchased by giant multination- als. For example, the American Telephone «SÍ Telegraph Co. has purchased BobbsMerrill, one of the older publishing houses in the U.S. General Foods owns Bantam Paperback Books. And recently, American Express Fi- nancial & Travel Services made an effort to purchase another multinational giant, Mc- Graw. The consequence of this invasion of publishing houses by huge multinationals has been the deterioration of creative content in the works they now publish. Young novelists are no longer nurtured and developed; they are either discarded or not published at all, if their works have only modest success. Black writers and other minorities suffer especially, because we confront the ideology of rac- ism that permeates U.S. thought and values. Further, this absorption of the publishing in- dustry creates the possibility of monolithic ideological control of creative expression by monopoly capital—in a new and naked way—without buffers.

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What U.S. writers and publishers have been doing, however, is creating small indepen- dent publishing houses, often run on a coop- erative or non-profit basis, to develop novels and poetry of quality. The human quest for aesthetic quality cannot be stifled by mass media. Now, in the U.S., many of the best talents have come from these small houses, in some cases to be then published by the media giants of New York. Public broadcast- ing stations, in radio and television, have of- fered quality alternatives, in however limited a fashion, to the media giants.

There are other matters to be considered, as well. We have in Nuestra America, and throughout the globe, what I would desig- nate as at least three cultural formulations, with reference to media and information distribution systems. There are the pre- capitalist modes, which are predominantly oral and nonliterate, and often characteristic of indigenous peoples. There is the capital- ist literate mode, which has its expression based upon printed media and correspond- ing literacy. For modern literacy, printing and the corresponding forms of organizing and distributing books and information had their genesis with the development of indus- trial capitalism in Europe and the U.S. in the 18th century. To perform the necessary tasks required it became essential that workers read and calculate and that a support staff of clerks, secretaries, bookkeepers, etc., be able to process and record information.

Finally, there is the imperialist electronic mode, which has dominated mass culture of the 20th century, and increasingly so. Where we once needed books and papers to record information, we now use videotapes, televi-

sion screens, computers, audiotapes, and all combinations of these instruments, powered by the most advanced electronic technology. It is this mode that we often invoke when we use the term "mass media" today. In the U.S., we have a situation where people have become media literate, who cannot oth- erwise read and write at a literature level. High school graduates cannot read, in many instances, and, in fact, college graduates are being produced with minimal literacy.

The individual who is dependent upon mass media for his or her ideas, information, art, insights, recreation, is tragically depen- dent and vulnerable. If one of the media giants stops broadcasting, he is without re- sources. Furthermore, the chance for signifi- cant political development is diminished by this dependency upon media organs domi- nated by imperialist vision, with its intoler- able and systematic racism.

Further, this mass media attempts increas- ingly to obscure the distinction between im- age and fact, fantasy and reality. This has led to terrible tragedy in the development of U.S. foreign policy, for many U.S. citizens in fact feel "kicked around" by theThird World, because the fantasies projected for them by U.S. mass media do not in fact have truth in reality. Victories by Third World people in Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Angola, Mozam- bique, among the many other nations, are the best rebuttal to the vicious fantasies of U.S. mass media.

But it is not enough to analyze—we must struggle to dismantle an imperialist system that limits all our lives. I would like to pro- pose some points for our consideration as

Robert Chrisman The Role ot Mass Media in U.S. Imperialism 59

intellectuals concerned with the deleterious effects of mass media upon the sovereignty of the people.

1. We should commit ourselves to the protection and preservation of indig- enous forms of cultural expression.

2. We must commit ourselves to artistic and cultural expression that advocates and manifests self-determination, na- tional identity and sovereignty.

3. We must produce work that reflects class-consciousness of oppressed peo- ples, which is, overwhelmingly, a working class consciousness, and we must produce work that manifests the struggle against racism.

4. We must sustain an analysis of inter- national bourgeois culture, both in its mass forms and its elitist forms, to extract that which is of value from it, and to comprehend and criticize the ideological strategy of imperialism.

5. We must be scrupulously honest, es- chewing pseudo-proletarian art that is in fact without conviction, and on the other extreme, nostalgic ethnicity or

empty bourgeois experimentalism in our art.

6. We must work together and continue exchanges of this sort, including the exploration of developing interna- tional information systems whereby we share our material and technical resources and begin to work as one people, with a common heritage and destiny, confronting at every and all levels, the propaganda, lies and jingo- ism of imperialist media.

That is our task today and it is the task of our lives.

Notes

1. "Imperialism and the Black Media," by the National Coordinating Committee of the group. Year to Pull the Covers off Imperialism (YTPTCOI), published In The Black Scholar, Vol. 6, No. 3 (November 1974), pp. 48-57.

2.YTPTCOI, op. cit. 3.YTPTCOI, op. cit.

4.YTPTCOI, op. cit.

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