Background

Herbert Schiller was born on November 5, 1919, in New York City, New York, United States. He was a son of Benjamin Franklin Schiller, a jewelry maker, and Gertrude (Perner) Schiller.

Education

A native New Yorker, Herbert grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and finished DeWitt Clinton High School.

In 1940, Herbert received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Science from the City College of the City University of New York. The following year, in 1941, he attained a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University. Later, Schiller entered New York University, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1960.

Career

In 1941-1942, Herbert held the post of a military economist in the United States Government. Between 1942 and 1945, he served in the United States Army, namely in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations.

During the period from 1949 till 1959, Herbert held the post of Economics educator at different educational establishments, including the City College at the City University of New York. From 1950 till 1963, he served as a Professor of Economics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he taught the subject to artists. In 1963-1965, Schiller acted as a Research Associate Professor at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research. Before moving to the University of California, San Diego in 1970, Schiller also worked as a Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It was in 1970, that Herbert turned his focus to communication studies, the subject, which he taught from 1970 till 1990 at the University of California, San Diego, holding the post of a Professor of Communication. In addition, in 1970, he founded the Department of Communication at the same university. Throughout the 1970's, Communication at the university was a fragile entity, popular among students, but marginal within the academic structure of the institution. On a number of occasions, it was close to elimination. In 1982, it finally became a regular department of the university and two years later, it established a Ph.D. program, which came to be among the best known worldwide.

Throughout his career, Schiller traveled extensively, holding visiting positions in Amsterdam, Tampere in Finland and Paris. He was in constant demand as a star speaker, a skill, that contributed to his influential role in UNESCO debates, where the free-flow-of-information doctrine began to be seen as a pro-west ideology. This criticism was a factor in the American and British withdrawal of financial aid from UNESCO in the mid-1980's.

During his career, Schiller penned a number of works. His books focus on the influence, that corporations have on media, especially television. Among his works are "Mass Communications and American Empire" (1969), "Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression" (1989) and "Living in the Number One Country: Reflections From a Critic of American Empire" (2000), among others.

Schiller also authored a number of reviews and articles for such periodicals, as the Nation and the Antioch Review. He continued writing to the end of his life.

In his last years, Herbert also taught frequently at New York University.

Achievements

• Herbert Schiller was a notable critic, author and educator, who studied the subject of communication. He was hailed as America's most original and influential media analyst.
  
  Beginning in the 1960's with a blast of radical writings and speeches, Schiller broke the silence in communication studies on the United States' 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 the American Empire and transnational corporate media power.
  
  It's important to note, that Schiller 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 beliefs, attitudes and ultimately people's behavior".
  
  Herbert's 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. Widely translated, Schiller's work had an important impact on developing countries, where the ruling elite attempted to control communication and where United States media companies often dominated international media markets. "Mass Communications and American Empire" (1969) and "The Mind Managers" (1973) are his best-known works.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Living in the Number One Country: Reflections From a Critic of American Empire

    (In this work, Schiller traces how the State has supported...)

    2000
  • Information and the Crisis Economy

    (This volume analyzes how information and the new informat...)

    1984
  • Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression

    (Most Americans take for granted, that they live in an ope...)

    1989
  • Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500

    (This book uses information to reveal the current intercon...)

    1981
  • Mass Communications and American Empire 1969
  • The Mind Managers 1973
  • The Ideology of International Communications 1992
  • Super-State: Readings in the Military-Industrial Complex 1970
  • Communication and Cultural Domination 1976

Politics

An outspoken liberal, Herbert publicly protested the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Views

Herbert argued, that providing more technological types of media simply gave corporations more ways to lure consumers with advertisements and lull them with bland entertainment. His early communication studies research countered the 1950's and 1960's conventional wisdom, that largely ignored any influence on media by political and economic power. He argued, that mass media's ties to the centers of that power tarnished its ability to provide a democratic forum and serve as a watchdog of government and business.

Also, Schiller warned of two major trends in his prolific writings and speeches: the private takeover of public space and public institutions at home and the United States' corporate domination of cultural life abroad, especially in the developing nations.

Schiller stood against information society utopians. Whenever business leaders enthused about new communications, he argued, they were selling wares, rather than improving the knowledgeability of the public.

Quotations: "The content and forms of American communications - the myths and the means of transmitting them - are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia, that precludes action."

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

"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."

"How well a posse policy will fare in a world with three 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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

Membership

Herbert was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Phi Beta Kappa. He also served as vice president of the International Association of Mass Communication Research.

• trustee

  International Institute of Communications

  1978 - 1984

Personality

Schiller was an immensely popular teacher, who always played to packed classrooms and was known for combining his biting criticisms of the media with dry humor and an openness to students' own ideas. He lectured at his best without notes.

Schiller enjoyed the irony of living in a small, but lovely house in La Jolla, an affluent Pacific coast town. Enthusiastic walkers, he and Anita, his wife, relished their nightly walks through vacant streets.

Physical Characteristics: Reportedly, Herbert was tall and angular.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Herbert gave shape and texture to the modern study of communication and culture in America." - Neil Postman, author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic

Connections

Herbert Schiller married Anita (Rosenbaum) Schiller, a librarian and scholar, on November 5, 1946. Their marriage produced two sons - Daniel T. Schiller and P. Zachary Schiller.

Father:

Benjamin Franklin Schiller

Mother:

Gertrude (Perner) Schiller

child:

Daniel T. Schiller

Daniel T. served as Telecommunications Historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is a Professor Emeritus now.

child:

P. Zachary Schiller

P. Zachary is a public policy analyst.

Wife:

Anita (Rosenbaum) Schiller

References

• Herbert Schiller 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 the 1960's, to the rise of the extreme right in the American political economy of the 1980's and 1990's.
  2003