AMERICA RULES THE AIRWAYS
Schiller, Herbert I.
AMERICA Rules the Airways by HERBERT I. SCHILLER Canada's radio and television air ^* waves are dominated by American programs. Many Canadians feel, consequently, that much of the broadcasting...
...They still sell the same vast bulk of soap, peanut butter, and pain killers...
...Second-ranking National Broadcasting Company asserts that its television show "Bonanza" is seen in fifty-seven lands, and "when you include the show's U.S...
...David Sarnoff, board chairman of Radio Corporation of America, predicts that "within a decade, possibly less, it will be technically feasible to broadcast directly into the home from synchronous satellites...
...radio-television programs wholly unsuited to the needs of the Third World, the world of the poor...
...Before long the original transmission will be beamed to the sky-borne satellite and from it directly into individual homes on several continents simultaneously...
...An inventory would soon become obsolete because the use of American materials and programs is expanding rapidly...
...Each new electronic development widens the perimeter of American influence, and the indivisibility of military and commercial activity functions to promote even greater expansion...
...In the Far East, Japan with its seventeen million receivers comes closest to Western standards of set ownership...
...But official broadcasting efforts, military and civilian, are only a limited side of America's international communications activities...
...The Voice of America, radio arm of the USIA, transmits some 800 hours in thirty-seven languages weekly to an overseas audience of unknown size...
...Broadcasting has a specific function in the American free market...
...Thailand has 250,000 sets in use, the Philippines 200,000, Malaysia 114,000, South Korea 50,000, Indonesia 45,200, and India, 2,000...
...The three commercial television networks spent an average of $125,000 on each hour of prime time programming to produce such enlightening packages as "Peyton Place," "Combat," "Ben Casey," and "The Rogues...
...For the Poor World the only kind of broadcasting that makes sense is educational radio-television...
...The United States now leads all other countries combined, twice over, as a program exporter . . . telefilm sales have expanded in 1964 to an estimated dollar value of about $70 million, spread through eighty countries...
...Kildare" is popular in Budapest, and that "with just a few exceptions, all foreign shows in Philippine television are imported from the United States...
...Communications media could be of great assistance in the realization of these aims if the media functioned as public educators...
...It is both the responsibility and burden of such leaders to do what they can to insure that the independence and improvement battles which have been waged so heroically by the global poor, should not be reversed because of the domination of the world's air waves by U.S...
...How completely the international community is being blanketed by radio-television programming produced in the United States has never been fully documented...
...In a country that cannot feed all its people, and whose per capita income is only a fraction of the cost of a single television receiver, the purchase of sets hardly rates as a public necessity...
...Profitability and salesmanship are the current criteria of broadcasting performance and it is realistic, if saddening, to expect more of the same...
...The new nations have no stake, as American broadcasting has, in lulling people into a state of passive acceptance of abundant comforts and the status quo...
...How rapidly these markets are filling out is indicated by the patterns of television set ownership across the world's poorer areas...
...broadcasting's "Big Three," produces and syndicates programming in seventy-six countries through its affiliates...
...The ability of developing nations to withstand the U.S...
...It can hardly avoid adopting modern radio and television techniques, even though the programming that accompanies the new technical networks flows largely, and perhaps inevitably, from New York and Hollywood, and is loaded with social dynamite and discouragement...
...The establishment of the Worldvision Corporation early this year, under the aegis of the American Broadcasting Company, links twenty-four countries—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Iran, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, Philippines, Syria, Venezuela, Okinawa, which is U.S...
...Granting this, can dangerous mass frustrations in the emergent nations be avoided in the face of American programs which invariably present wastefulness, trivial consumption, and' personal indulgence as normal and desirable personal and social forms of behavior...
...He contributes articles to popular and scholarly journals on natural resource issues and on economic development and communications...
...As for the few programs that are sent abroad through the USIA, they do not begin to match the enormous global need for information and education...
...Besides forty-four powerful domestically-based transmitters, the agency operates sixty-two transmitters overseas, including broadcasting installations in HERBERT I. SCHILLER, research associate professor in the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Illinois, is editor of the Quarterly Review of Economics and Business...
...In 1963, educational television (ETV) received a total income of less than $35 million while the commercial system grossed $1,600 million...
...The number of sets in Africa rose from 577,000 in February, 1965, to 698,750 in July...
...Assuming national planning programs of reasonable efficiency and good sense—an optimistic expectation in itself—hard physical labor and austere living standards will remain, for decades to come, the indispensable prerequisites for material improvement in the developing countries...
...broadcasting studios...
...With the present patterns of ownership, control, and motivation in the domestic communications industries left undisturbed, it is optimistic to expect that the new technology will be used with greater social responsibility than has been demonstrated so far...
...audience, the series is seen by more than 350-000,000 people around the world...
...Also still present are the same vast bulk of movies and cartoons, repeats from former network seasons, sob stories, and game shows...
...distributor is selling films at cut-rate prices [in Latin America, Africa, and Asia] against the day when these markets will become stronger...
...Today, overseas sales account for sixty per cent of all U.S...
...This is only an interim arrangement...
...Television Age reported last summer that Mexico takes ninety-eight per cent of her import shows from the United States, that "Dr...
...commercial broadcasting intrinsically reflects a value system and a model of life that run fundamentally counter to the Poor World's growth design...
...NBC International reports that it "currently deals with 303 stations in eighty-one non-domestic areas...
...Such is the finding of a government-appointed Committee on Broadcasting, published recently in a report titled after its chairman, R. M. Fowler, president of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association and head also of an earlier (1957) Royal Commission on Broadcasting...
...The Columbia Broadcasting System, largest of U.S...
...telefilm syndication activities and represent the difference between profit and loss for the entire industry...
...About fifty-four per cent of the Dominion's households are within range of American stations, and the three thousand mile common frontier offers no barrier to electromagnetic impulses originating in U.S...
...On this shrinking planet, the Third World must secure social distance from its advanced neighbors or be pulled onto developmental paths that could negate their struggles for liberation and progress...
...The social and economic conditions in the United States, which produce the American brand of radio-television, have no parallel in the Poor World, or scarcely anywhere else for that matter...
...Foreign sales were, until a few years ago, a source of random profits peripheral to revenues from syndication at home...
...Liberia, on the Isle of Rhodes, and in England, and has more facilities planned for locations outside North America...
...What, if anything, can the have-nots expect from the United States in this respect...
...Communications satellites have been catapulted aloft, carrying with them the capacity to bounce back transmitted messages to the most remote regions on earth...
...The economy depends on radio and television to sell an important share of the goods its high-capacity, self-determined industries churn out in such chaotic abundance...
...The technology for the potential satisfaction of these requirements is near completion...
...Philip Coombs, former Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, reports that the "foreign audience is believed to outnumber overseas American listeners by about twenty to one...
...The furor which is aroused when the Federal Communications Commission attempts so modest a regulation of domestic broadcasting as curbing the loudness of commercials (limiting their frequency was such a bold step that it brought forth a Congressional rebuke), indicates the likely character of future international commercial broadcasting via satellite...
...Eighty per cent of all Australian television programming consists of imports from the United States...
...Many Canadians feel, consequently, that much of the broadcasting they see and hear is not serving Canadian needs...
...The present chairman, E. William Henry, revisited the scene in 1965 and reported that "television has changed very little...
...What we want to hear about are the experiments carried out by the Argentinians and the Burmese in their efforts to overcome illiteracy or dictatorial tendencies of their leaders...
...All of the basic components and technology already exist for radio and television transmitters to operate in space...
...It matters enormously to the world's poor that the American system of electronic communications, technically without a peer, is socially the most backward to be found among the industrialized countries...
...Broadcasting's responsibility in the emergent states, if thus identified and accepted, would have little resemblance to radio-television as it now functions in America...
...In 1961, Newton S. Minow, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, labeled television "a vast wasteland...
...Sports coverage has become more intense...
...Commercial television has become an important and flourishing national export...
...The Canadian experience represents only a sector, and a small one at that, of a staggering global invasion by American electronic communications...
...Though we are the center of global affluence, the condition of educational television is described by the chairman of the FCC as "our electronic Appalachia...
...This homogenized American culture, developed in an atmosphere of excess production and deficient demand, is being offered relentlessly to all corners of the earth...
...The revolution in communications technology that has occurred in this century is now in its climactic phase...
...Daytime schedules have a few stimulating programs for children and adults...
...In Latin America, Colombia with 360,000 sets, Cuba with 500,000, Mexico with 1,800,-000, Argentina with 1,550,000, and Brazil with 2,400,000, lead the Way...
...As with land, minerals, and most other natural resources in America, our air waves have been removed as rapidly as possible from the public domain...
...Living as it does on slim rations, our ETV cannot supply the modernizing nations with educational communications assistance...
...With quite different goals in mind, the decision-makers in the Third World can be no less conscious of the extent to which their peoples' destinies are affected by the radio and television programs that will be raining down on them...
...For the world still-in-the-making, the spreading international influence of American commercial radio-television is of doubtful benefit...
...Broadcasting industries in most of the world are still in their infancy, hardly capable of producing the materials that developmental goals require...
...In 1964, the few hours of evening time offered by National Education Television cost a little more than $19,000 an hour to program...
...We are," chairman Henry declares, "the only major nation in the world without radio and television networks that are independent of advertiser support...
...The small number of television receivers in India is a result of government caution concerning the introduction of television...
...It is not only a matter of protecting relatively weak national producers in poorer countries against extremely powerful U.S...
...In Africa, the United Arab Republic lists 422,000 sets, Algeria 150,000, and Nigeria 21,000...
...There have been many pilot surveys to determine whether to open the door to the great economic and social burdens that would be created by widespread ownership of sets...
...India, Ghana, Algeria, Kenya, the United Arab Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, and many other poor countries are striving to produce broadcast programming suitable to domestic requirements...
...administered, and the United States—in a venture that introduces commercial broadcasting to some hitherto virgin overseas territory and provides, at the same time, additional outlets for American shows and programs...
...American radio-television is first and always entertainmentoriented, with the single objective of delivering its audience to one salesman or another...
...Dizard found that "the daily schedule of a typical Australian television station is, particularly in prime listening hours, virtually indistinguishable from that of a station in Iowa or New Jersey...
...Accordingly, the Poor World faces some unhappy choices...
...The opportunities and perils of simultaneous global communications beamed into the home are almost upon us, in an era when the Poor World's need for enlightenment and education is enormous...
...The commercial orientation of the communications satellite program, turned over by the government to private enterprise, is an inauspicious beginning...
...In all the years from 1961 to 1965, the proportion of the total network time devoted to public service programs . . . has remained about four per cent...
...The creation of an international communications satellite consortium, in which the privately-owned Comsat corporation is the dominant shareholder and decision-maker, adds still another agency that reinforces the attempt of U.S...
...Just the reverse is true...
...The Department of Defense, for instance, operates a broadcasting network across the world with thirty-eight television and more than 200 radio transmitters...
...ABC modestly claims that "Worldvision is ABC International's world-wide television network," as well as being "the fastest growing advertising medium in the world...
...in the Near East from 403,800 to 499,350 during those few months...
...The heavy exposure of Canadian audiences to American radio-television culture is to some extent a matter of geography...
...For growth and development the new nations require an energized population, actively seeking to contribute to the public weal...
...Wilson P. Dizard, a staff member of USIA, gave this account in Television Quarterly: "American television products, for better and for worse, are setting the tone for television programming throughout the world in much the same way Hollywood did for motion pictures forty years ago...
...Though American telefilms currently are obtaining their largest revenues from the high-income countries whose audiences are prospective customers for the local advertising messages that may accompany and finance the film showings, the developing world receives attention too...
...If there is any prospect that cultural diversity will survive anywhere on this planet, it depends largely on the willingness and capability of scores of weak nations to forego the programming of America's entertainment industries and steadfastly develop, however slowly, their own broadcast material...
...The private sector has come along rapidly...
...Will it be applied for that purpose...
...The agency also distributes taped programs and scripts to local stations throughout the world and estimates that its materials are broadcast by more than 5,000 stations for a combined total of 13,000 hours a week...
...But the American mass media's penetration (perhaps saturation is more accurate) of the Canadian scene cannot be explained fully as merely a matter of adjoining real estate...
...In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes, "The news which interests the Third World does not deal with King Baudoin's marriage nor the scandals of the Italian ruling class...
...In the Near East, Iran claims 100,-000 receivers, Lebanon 126,000, and Iraq, 175,000...
...electronic onslaught under way is even now extremely limited, and the pace of technical development that batters down their puny defenses is accelerating...
...The result has been a cheapening of the medium and the sacrifice of cultural values to immediate gain...
...Bilateral arrangements for U.S: telefilm exports are being extended and consolidated into regional and even intercontinental associations...
...The necessary human skills and technical facilities are in desperately short supply...
...Responsible leaders of the Poor World strive desperately to secure domestic integration in their various nations, strengthen cultural identities for their people, stimulate productive effort throughout the economy, and restore national dignity...
...enterprise at worldwide communications hegemony...
...Like the Beatles, we need help ourselves...
...Will this information come from the international communications system currently being placed in operation...
...The explosive and critical issue is that the film and radio material produced in the United States is so appallingly in conflict with the specialized and unique needs of the Poor World...
...If programming objectives recognized a nation's developmental goals, then massive campaigns to reduce illiteracy, train manpower, and establish honest forums for popular discussion would receive the highest priorities...
...Patterns of behavior that are operative in the mature, corporation-directed economy of the United States are being disseminated to peoples in the most primitive stages of industrial organization...
...There is, in addition, a huge civilian governmental broadcasting establishment, the United States Information Agency (USIA), which concerns itself, among other things, with transmissions to foreign audiences...
...Dizard points out, "Almost every major U.S...
...At the same time, the technical and economic conditions of broadcasting make it difficult, if not impossible, for most countries to escape American transmissions...
...The irrelevance and inappropriateness of the media's offerings to the economic and social needs of the destitute world are arresting...
...Equally perplexing, how will the leaders in the emergent nations avail themselves of the new technology and, at the same time, insulate their societies from the unsuitable material pumped into the circuits by the commerce-driven few...
...David Sarnoff claims that ". . . the nation which leads in communications is also equipped for leadership in many other crucial areas of national and international endeavor...
...Regular television series programs are prepared by our government for Japan, Nigeria, Thailand, and all of Latin America...
...competitors, important and difficult as that would be in itself...
...What is worse, we make problems for those who have more than a few things to worry about already...
...For the time being it is still necessary that the deflected message pass through central reception stations for retransmittal to home receivers...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
