Herbert Schiller

Herbert Irving Schiller (November 5, 1919 – January 29, 2000) was an American media critic, sociologist, author, and scholar. He earned his PhD in 1960 from New York University.

" how can a democratic discourse exist in a corporate owned informational system? Who, for example, possesses freedom of speech in such a society?"

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Living In The Number One Country (2000)

• I have never forgotten how the deprivation of work erodes human beings, those not working and those related to them. And from that time on, I loathed an economic that could put a huge part of its workforce on the streets with no compunction.
  • Introduction, One Life, One Century, p. 12

• My university education had been a shallow and superficial enterprise. The central driving forces of the economy I lived in were either ignored or left vague, to the point of meaningless.
  • Introduction, One Life, One Century, p. 19

• In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor.
  • Chapter One, Number One And the Political Economy Of Communication, p. 56

• Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.
  • Chapter One, Number One And the Political Economy Of Communication, p. 56

• The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.
  • Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 67

• How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine.
  • Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 70

• Ultimately, each transnational firm strives for its own advantage, and is supported in that effort by the state power wherein it resides, or at least where its main shareholders are domiciled.
  • Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 78

• In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade".
  • Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 80

• The flow of information it promotes is free in one respect only. The flow is expected to be freely admitted to all the spaces that its providers desire to transmit to. Otherwise there is nothing free about the information. Quite the contrary. Information and message flows are already, and will continue to be, priced to exact the highest revenues extractable.
  • Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 85

• With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested.
  • Chapter Three, Communication Today: What's New?, p. 92

• Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.
  • Chapter Three, Communication Today: What's New?, p. 94

• How did thinking that benefited the few gain the acceptance of the many?
  • Chapter Four, Communication Theorists Of Empire, p. 108

• Capitalism cannot be reduced to one or a few features, but it does possess one relationship, central to its existence and operation, that constitutes the essence of inequality and ineradicable instability: the wage-labor-capital connection that dwells at the heart of the system.
  • Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 132

• " how can a democratic discourse exist in a corporate owned informational system? Who, for example, possesses freedom of speech in such a society?"
  • Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 138

• Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.
  • Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 138

• But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.
  • Chapter Six, In the Core Of power, p. 154

• The "cumulative effects" of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to assess, constitute one key to the impact of growing up in the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests unpreparedness for, and lack of interest in, the world that exists outside the shopping mall.
  • Chapter Six, In the Core Of power, p. 171

• One growing threat to the stability of the U.S. economy, and therefore to its capability to continue to direct the global order, paradoxically emerges from its success in establishing capitalism around the world.
  • Chapter Seven, Number One In The Twenty-First Century, p. 183-184

• Popular dissatisfaction seems to occur only when the shopping or the commercials are interrupted. In such an atmosphere, is there any reason to imagine that saturation shopping could be a source of instability to the U.S. world position?
  • Chapter Seven, Number One In The Twenty-First Century, p. 198