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 Cort-
zar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Gonza-
les Casanova, Georgia Lamming, Roberto
Matta, Miguel Otero Silva and Mariano
Rodriguez.
J
aime Labastida was head of the Mexican
Committee 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 mediato inform, to pro-
pagandize and to create consumersgrew
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
56 THEBLACKSCHOLAR TBS Volume 43 Number 3 Fall 2013
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 experiencesuch 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 S
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 capitalin a new and naked
waywithout buffers.
58 THEBLACKSCHOLAR
TBS Volume 43 Number 3 Fall 2013
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 analyzewe 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.
60 THEBLACKSCHOLAR TBS Volume 43 Number 3 Fall 2013