Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control Of Media Means For America And The World

by Herbert Irving Schiller, George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana (Editor)

Hidden from public sight and mind today are invisible crises that threaten our democracy and existence more than the crises we know about—or think we know about. These invisible crises include the promotion of practices that drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; cults of violence that desensitize, terrorize, and brutalize; the growing siege mentality of our cities; widening resource gaps and the most glaring inequalities in the industrial world; the costly neglect of vital institutions such as public education and the arts; and media-assisted make-believe image politics corrupting the electoral process.Deprived of sustained attention but bombarded by eruptions of surface consequences (often presented as unique events stripped of historical context), people ar bewildered, fearful, angry, and cynical.The contributors to this volume—exploring such unattended crises, analyzing why they are hidden, and focusing on the increasing concentration of culture-power that keeps them from view—maintain that a profound general crisis of social vision, public communication, and representative government underlies all of the invisible crises.

306 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

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.”