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Herbert Schiller Quotes

Herbert Irving Schiller was an American media critic, sociologist, author, and scholar. He earned his PhD in 1960 from New York University.

Schiller warned of two major trends in his prolific writings and speeches: the private takeover of public space and public institutions at home, and U.S. corporate domination of cultural life abroad, especially in the developing nations. His eight books and hundreds of articles in both scholarly and popular journals made him a key figure both in communication research and in the public debate over the role of the media in modern society. He was widely known for the term “packaged consciousness,” that argues American media is controlled by a few corporations that “create, process, refine and preside over the circulation of images and information which determines our beliefs, attitudes and ultimately our behavior.” Schiller used Time Warner Inc. as an example of packaged consciousness, stating that it “basically dominates publishing, cable television, recordings, tapes and filmmaking.”He was married to librarian and scholar Anita Schiller, and their children include sons Zach and Dan. Zach Schiller is a public policy analyst in Ohio, and Dan Schiller is a telecommunications historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. November 1919 – 29. January 2000
Herbert Schiller: 19 quotes0 likes

Famous Herbert Schiller Quotes

“How did thinking that benefited the few gain the acceptance of the many?”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Four, Communication Theorists Of Empire, p. 108

“Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter One, Number One And the Political Economy Of Communication, p. 56

“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."”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 80

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 132

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Introduction, One Life, One Century, p. 12
Living In The Number One Country (2000)

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Six, In the Core Of power, p. 154

Herbert Schiller Quotes about the world

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 67

“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?”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Seven, Number One In The Twenty-First Century, p. 198

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 70

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), 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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Seven, Number One In The Twenty-First Century, p. 183-184

Herbert Schiller Quotes

“Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 138

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Three, Communication Today: What's New?, p. 92

“In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter One, Number One And the Political Economy Of Communication, p. 56

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Introduction, One Life, One Century, p. 19
Living In The Number One Country (2000)

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 78

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Two, Visions Of Global Electronic Mastery, p. 85

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

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 138

“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.”

Herbert Schiller

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Three, Communication Today: What's New?, p. 94

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