Herbert I. Schiller (1919-2000): Radical scholar, teacher, activist

Although I was not one of his students, I had the privilege of meeting Prof. Schiller at several international conferences, including those organized by the International Association for Mass Communication Research. I also taught his books in my courses on the political economy of communications. Prof. Schiller’s contributions to our knowledge of cultural domination, the institutions, their policies and the process not only enriched the field of communications studies, but empowered the scholars from the South in different ways. This short essay is intended to pay particular tribute to Dr. Schiller’s work in that regard.

Trained as a political economist, Prof. Schiller was an outsider to the field of communications which, in the aftermath of World War II, was beginning to grow as an academic enterprise at the University of Illinois. Dominated by functionalist sociology and blind to its own ideological trappings, much of the work that was published in the leading journals in communications ignored the ideological content of mass communications. It failed to see the media’s connections to structures of power and domination, especially that of the United States. Theories of modernization and development proposed by some of the key proponents (Schramm, Lerner, Rogers) were uncritical and ahistorical; imperialism and its many coercive mechanisms were not subjected to any scrutiny. Underdevelopment, according to these theorists, was not a historical process but one of lack of acceptance of technology and capitalist democracy.

Against this backdrop, it becomes crystal clear as to how incredibly important Prof. Schiller’s Mass Communications and American Empire was when it came out in 1969. Although this type of critical theory-based scholarship, for the most part, was marginalized in the academic discourse throughout the 1970s, it left an indelible mark on the content and direction of communications research. It opened a new path for scholarship. Critical communications research never received the recognition it deserved and was treated as heresy in the established communications departments at most, if not all, of the major research universities. One did not ask questions about class, race or gender, let alone raise issues about imperialism. Those of us who were graduate students at the time were not assigned any of the writings of Prof. Schiller. The same treatment was meted out to other political economists who offered leftist critiques of the media, such as Dallas Smythe or Thomas Guback.

We discovered this scholarship accidentally, on our own, and felt incredibly encouraged that certain important questions regarding the intersections of politics and economics could be broached in graduate education. Underdevelopment in one part of the world, we learned, was directly related to development in another. Economic policy and cultural policy often went hand in hand. In fact, it was gratifying to see that one could write dissertations dealing with issues such as global information hegemony and how it serves the needs of capital and US imperialism; cultural diplomacy of the West that was aimed at keeping the global markets open for trade.

This was heady stuff for those of us who felt trapped as graduate students in that seemingly barren field of mass communications. The famous refrain at major graduate schools of mass communications in the US at the time was, ‘Ours is not to ask why but to quantify.’ Some of the students from the South certainly felt that these graduate programmes were attempting to turn us into unthinking, but statistically sophisticated, researchers. Seldom were we allowed to ask the question ‘Why is human society in such a mess? What is the relationship between media institutions and this ruinous path of development? How are colonialism and neocolonial relations connected to national development and mass media?’ I was rescued from such graduate education in 1976 by a happenstance reading of one of Dallas Smythe’s essays. I came to read the work of Prof. Herbert Schiller soon after.

Prof. Schiller was a teacher’s teacher. He was committed to encouraging students to become adept at analyzing media content and how it affects the way we see the world and, in that process, how media industries perpetuate systemic domination. His enthusiasm and passion for this analysis never wavered. Prof. Schiller was a gifted speaker who could reach large audiences. Even those who were suspicious of his ideas would laugh with him and identify with at least some of his arguments. He had this uncanny ability to pick stories from the daily press and construct a set of arguments about capitalist media and their centrality for a particular kind of development. These speeches were seldom written down. He would pull a paper clipping out of his pocket and go on to present an absorbing narrative which included an incisive textual analysis of the politics and economics contained in that journalistic story.

Never one for jargon, Prof. Schiller could easily be understood by everyone. When he published Communications and Cultural Domination (1976) where he proposed the grand theory of cultural imperialism, some suggested that his arguments were simplistic. In fact, his arguments hung on a sophisticated model of imperialism and capitalist development. He theorized international communications from a radical perspective. He remained one of the most ardent critics of US media, particularly the self-serving doctrines of ‘free flow of information’ and ‘free trade’ that the USA promoted with regards to the New World Information and Communication Order debates. He never gave up on socialism, unlike many radicals whose consciousness was shaped during the Cold War and the Counter Culture days of the 1960s.

Over the last 20 years, I had many personal encounters with Prof. Schiller. I first met him in the late 1970s when I was doing my PhD at Simon Fraser University. He was spending a week in the Department of Communications, which at the time was headed by Dallas Smythe, who supervised my dissertation. I went to speak with Prof. Schiller about my interest in doing political economy research on India’s mass media. I remember that it was a pleasant conversation and he encouraged me to pursue my goals. Later on, I met him at leading international conferences and twice at events that I’d helped organize at Northwestern University. He complained to me once that he was never invited by any senior University official in North America although he had published numerous books and articles and was cited in hundreds of publications. We hosted Prof. Schiller at the Program on Communication & Development Studies at Northwestern University.

I was always impressed by Prof. Schiller’s enthusiasm for younger scholars who were doing critical communications research. That was an important value to learn for any professor-in-training because mentoring students is a principal part of our occupation. He always came to conferences with the announcement of his next book - a lesson for any younger scholar that it was important to remain active.

Prof. Schiller worked relentlessly to draw our attention to the ideological moorings of the dominant paradigm in communication research which was supposed to be ‘objective’ and ‘value free’. He helped create an alternative frame work for analysis of corporate media and its relationship to power globally. He himself has spoken about how he came to discover this stream of thinking and developed the necessary sensibilities to produce this considerable body of research in an interview by John Lent in A Different Road Taken: Profiles in Critical Communication (Westview, 1995). In communications studies, Professor Schiller has left a rich legacy, one that we should all celebrate.

Manjunath Pendakur (PhD) is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.