The Role of Mass Mediain U.S. Imperialism

ROBERT CHRISMAN

This address was delivered by RobertChrisman at the conference "The Dialogueof the Americas," September 9-13, 1982,Mexico City. The Dialogue was dedicatedto improving communications betweenEnglish-speaking and Spanish-speakingintellectuals in the Western Hemisphere.Over 500 delegates and observers were inattendance, including a large multiracialcontingent from the U.S. Held in the Mu-seum of Anthropology in Mexico City, theDialogue was a continuation of the historicconference held in Havana, Cuba, in Sep-tember 1981, the "Meeting of Intellectualsfor the Sovereignty of Our America." TheMexico City Dialogue was implemented bythe Standing Committee of Intellectualsfor the Sovereignty of the Peoples of OurAmerica, 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, RobertoMatta, Miguel Otero Silva and MarianoRodriguez.

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 "thesovereignty of the peoples/' panels wereconducted on ideological debate in theAmericas, the situation of the intellectuals inthe Americas, the problem of nationalities,mass media, unity and difference among theAmericas, common concerns of intellectualsin the Americas, and ideas and responses.

This most important Dialogue comes ata time when minority people of the U.S.A.are struggling to maintain sovereignty, dig-nity and humanity in the face of crunchingeconomic blows and revived racism. In thisrespect we have deep empathy for the em-battled peoples of Nicaragua, Grenada, ElSalvador, Haiti, Cuba, and the many othernations of Nuestra America who struggle fortheir sovereignty, though they might not atthis moment to be in the throes of the hurri-cane. Two powerful events in the past monthhave served notice that the peoples of OurAmerica will protect their sovereignty: thenationalization of banks by Mexico, andCuba's recent broadcast to the U.S., whichserved to show the U.S. that Cuba has themeans and will to protect its radio spacefrom intrusion by the so-called Radio Marti.

There is an interrelationship between therise of U.S. imperialism in the late nine-teenth century and the growth of U.S. massmedia, in all its forms. The modern charac-teristics of news media—to inform, to pro-pagandize and to create consumers—grewout of the continued growth and expansionof the U.S. economy. Now saturation tech-niques are perfected that literally bombardthe senses, often with more stimuli than theycan handle. Let us consider, for example,the growth of newspapers in the U.S. From1880 through 1910, newspapers grew from

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3 million to 22.5 million in circulation. Onekey statistic is that in 1883 we have the firstyear that advertising exceeded circulationas a source of income.^ This fact signals theemergence 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, mostfamously by the scandalous campaign ofthe Hearst newspaper chain to have the U.S.intervene in Cuba's war of independence of1895. Furthermore, the agitation of mediasurrounding the explosion of the battleshipMaine was a harbinger of the Gulf of Tonkinincident in Vietnam, where the U.S. mediaserved to fabricate and inflame a fantasy.

Radio reveals a similar growth pattern.Between 1922 and 1925, radio grew from400,000 sets to 4 million. And later, thenumber of televisions jumped from 10,000in 1945 to lO million in 1949.^ This is notonly a prodigious expansion of media andits ability to saturate consciousness, but italso demonstrates huge economic growth.

Because the mass media has estheticquality, we tend to overlook the extent towhich mass media is a huge business. Butwhen examined, giant U.S. media compa-nies manifest the familiar pattern of mo-nopolies sustained by finance capital. Notsurprisingly, then, banks have dominantownership in the three major U.S. nationalTV companies, ABC, CBS and NBC. "Elevenbanks have voting rights to 38. 1 percent ofthe common stock in CBS. Eight banks havevoting rights to 34.1 percent of the commonstock in ABC. Chase Manhattan and BankersTrust together have voting rights to 19.8 per-cent of the stock in CBS and 17.4 percent ofthe stock of ABC. To summarize, banks and

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

To give you some idea of the scale, thesize of the television giants, consider the fol-lowing statistics. ABC TV network has 168affiliates, 5 TV stations, 4 ABC radio net-works, with 1,254 affiliates. It is the largestmotion picture distribution chain, owningover 434 Paramount Theatres. ABC Interna-tional has controlling interests in 16 foreigncompanies operating television stations in26 countries and ABC World division di-rectly owns 64 foreign television stations.And NBC, which is jointly controlled bythe Rockefeller and Morgan finance groups.RCA owns all of NBC and is one of the 20largest corporations in the world. In addi-tion, RCA also owns Random House Pub-lishers, RCA Records, .Hertz Rent-a-Car. Itsmore than 60 factories produce some 1,200products, and RCA is a leading supplier ofelectronic 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 ofall TV air time is taken up by advertising. In1968, newspaper, radio and TV ads broughtin $10.8 billion."

We are also familiar with the range andthrust 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 televisionprogramming of South America is suppliedby the U.S., at the same time the illiteratepopulation over 15 years of age amounts tomore 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 frighteningproportions, and a powerful instrument inthe process of suppressing the sovereigntyof peoples throughout their nations. In thisprocess, of course, it also violates one of themost fundamental of human rights: the rightto a clear and informed consciousness, theright to develop and enhance cultural life. Itis precisely our capacity as human beings torecord our ideas, experiences and emotionsin symbolic form that permits the richnessof human life. Not only is fact recorded, butin the artistic mediums, emotions, ideas andpassions are expressed and cleansed as weobjectify our feelings and grow as persons inthis process. Tragically, some of the most dis-tinguished creative and academic talent inthe United States is used to create advertis-ing jingles and images. Great jazz and bluessingers like Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charlesare used to sing the praises of Kentucky FriedChicken 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 resourcesthat the peoples of the U.S. and NuestraAmerica have to struggle against its negativeeffects.

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

as commodities, and the human being is anobject that is deliberately, willfully and sci-entifically stimulated to perform in certainways.

Such an approach ignores the realityof events, it ignores the social cohesion ofpeople and their values of their communitiesand nations, values that derive from sharedreal 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 formof patriarchal capitalism and regarded as agentleman's profession, the publishing indus-try is being purchased by giant multination-als. For example, the American Telephone «SÍTelegraph Co. has purchased BobbsMerrill,one of the older publishing houses in theU.S. General Foods owns Bantam PaperbackBooks. And recently, American Express Fi-nancial & Travel Services made an effort topurchase another multinational giant, Mc-Graw. The consequence of this invasion ofpublishing houses by huge multinationals hasbeen the deterioration of creative content inthe works they now publish. Young novelistsare no longer nurtured and developed; theyare either discarded or not published at all, iftheir works have only modest success. Blackwriters 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 monolithicideological control of creative expressionby monopoly capital—in a new and nakedway—without buffers.

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

There are other matters to be considered,as well. We have in Nuestra America, andthroughout the globe, what I would desig-nate as at least three cultural formulations,with reference to media and informationdistribution systems. There are the pre-capitalist modes, which are predominantlyoral and nonliterate, and often characteristicof indigenous peoples. There is the capital-ist literate mode, which has its expressionbased upon printed media and correspond-ing literacy. For modern literacy, printingand the corresponding forms of organizingand distributing books and information hadtheir genesis with the development of indus-trial capitalism in Europe and the U.S. in the18th century. To perform the necessary tasksrequired it became essential that workersread and calculate and that a support staffof clerks, secretaries, bookkeepers, etc., beable to process and record information.

Finally, there is the imperialist electronicmode, which has dominated mass culture ofthe 20th century, and increasingly so. Wherewe once needed books and papers to recordinformation, we now use videotapes, televi-

sion screens, computers, audiotapes, and allcombinations of these instruments, poweredby the most advanced electronic technology.It is this mode that we often invoke whenwe use the term "mass media" today. In theU.S., we have a situation where people havebecome media literate, who cannot oth-erwise read and write at a literature level.High school graduates cannot read, in manyinstances, and, in fact, college graduates arebeing produced with minimal literacy.

The individual who is dependent uponmass media for his or her ideas, information,art, insights, recreation, is tragically depen-dent and vulnerable. If one of the mediagiants stops broadcasting, he is without re-sources. Furthermore, the chance for signifi-cant political development is diminished bythis 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 hasled to terrible tragedy in the development ofU.S. foreign policy, for many U.S. citizens infact feel "kicked around" by theThird World,because the fantasies projected for them byU.S. mass media do not in fact have truthin reality. Victories by Third World people inCuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Angola, Mozam-bique, among the many other nations, arethe best rebuttal to the vicious fantasies ofU.S. mass media.

But it is not enough to analyze—we muststruggle to dismantle an imperialist systemthat 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 deleteriouseffects of mass media upon the sovereigntyof the people.

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

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

3. We must produce work that reflectsclass-consciousness of oppressed peo-ples, which is, overwhelmingly, aworking class consciousness, and wemust produce work that manifests thestruggle against racism.

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

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

empty bourgeois experimentalism inour art.

6. We must work together and continueexchanges of this sort, including theexploration of developing interna-tional information systems wherebywe share our material and technicalresources and begin to work as onepeople, with a common heritage anddestiny, confronting at every and alllevels, the propaganda, lies and jingo-ism of imperialist media.

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

Notes

1. "Imperialism and the Black Media," bythe National Coordinating Committee of thegroup. 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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