Herbert Schiller

by Richard Maxwell

Hailed as America's most original and influential media analyst of the left, Herbert I. Schiller (1919-2000) was a pioneer of critical communication studies. Beginning in the 1960s with a blast of radical writings and speeches, Schiller broke the silence in communication studies on U.S. imperialism and cold war information policy, challenged private business schemes to commercialize the public supply of information, revealed government policies that helped create the market-based information economy, and demystified the hype of computerized wonders in the information age. Schiller's research on cultural imperialism became a vital thread in the global struggle against American Empire and transnational corporate media power. Maxwell's synthesis fuses biography with a digest of Herbert Schiller's major works to illustrate how his core ideas and concerns are anchored to the times in which he lived: from the Great Depression and world war, to national liberation struggles and the radicalism of 1960s, to the rise of the extreme right in the American political economy of the 1980s and 1990s.

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2003

About the author

Richard Maxwell is Professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. His research has focused on international communication and media, political economy and media, surveillance and data protection, and the environmental impact of media.