Herbert Schiller; Author Studied Corporate Influence on Culture

Herbert I. Schiller, pioneering writer and educator in communications studies who warned of American corporate takeover of public institutions here and cultural life abroad, has died at the age of 80.

Schiller, who created UC San Diego’s Department of Communication in 1970, died Saturday in La Jolla, university officials announced.

“He was one of the last angry men from that amazing generation of the Depression,” said Del Mar literary agent Sandra Dijkstra who handled two of Schiller’s eight attention-getting if controversial books, “Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression” in 1989 and “Information Inequality” in 1996.

Schiller’s ninth book, “Living in the No. 1 Country: Reflections From a Critic of American Empire,” will be published this spring by Seven Stories Press.

A promotional brochure from the publisher states:

“This intriguing book argues that the main pillar of today’s U.S. economy--the ever-expanding communication sector--is also the most crucial element in keeping a 500-year social system, capitalism, alive. Capitalism’s future, however, relies not only on labor exploitation, but also on a steadily entertained, hence diverted, populace.”

An outspoken liberal who publicly protested the Persian Gulf War in 1991 in pro-military San Diego, Schiller endeared himself to students and administrators alike by his acceptance of ideas radically opposed to his own. The graduate class called “Media Analysis,” which he taught for more than 20 years before his semi-retirement from UC San Diego in 1990, was designed for 25 students but regularly drew 80 or 90. The witty professor prided himself on prodding his students to dispute his views, often noting: “I’m mature enough to know that I don’t always have the right answer.”

Trained as an economist, the New York native earned his bachelor’s degree at City College of New York, his master’s degree at Columbia University, and after serving as a military economist in Berlin during and after World War II, a doctorate from New York University. It was during the Berlin postwar occupation that the scholarly Schiller began viewing reconstruction of the economy as a business-dominated social order.

Schiller began thinking about corporate and media influence on modern society during his decade or so as economics professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He first dissected the media--then newspapers, television and film--in a classroom when he moved to UC San Diego in 1969.

Eventually Schiller expanded his mass media criticism to include all forms of advertising, censorship, mass bookstore chains, alteration of news photos, television programming as well as commercials, and even theme parks touting sales of toys and other tie-in items. Corporate concentration on urging consumers to buy, and at the same time lulling them with homogenized entertainment, he reiterated over the decades, dulled people’s urges for independent thinking, free speech and other necessary components in a democracy.

“We’re getting this picture of an increasingly enriched information environment--a gee-whiz approach to technology,” Schiller told The Times in 1981, but quickly added that “It’s a misnomer to call it the Information Age.”

Providing more technological types of media, he argued, simply gave corporations more ways to lure consumers with advertisements and lull them with bland entertainment.

“The prospect is so overwhelmingly gruesome--this electronic cottage, this utopian society,” he said in 1981. “It’s an inversion of what any kind of reasonably attractive society is all about.”

In addition to his books, Schiller wrote hundreds of articles in popular and scholarly publications in the United States and abroad, including “The Nation” and “Le Monde Diplomatique.”

“Herb Schiller was a valuable national resource,” Neil Postman, author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and an NYU colleague of Schiller’s, said in a statement. “It is not too much to say that he gave shape and texture to the modern study of communication and culture in America.”

Schiller’s early communications studies research countered the 1950s and 1960s 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 watchdog of government and business.

The maverick educator’s first book was “Mass Communications and American Empire” in 1969, followed by “Superstate: Readings in the Military-Industrial Complex” in 1970, and perhaps his best-known, “The Mind Managers,” in 1973. His other thought-provoking books included “Communication and Cultural Domination” in 1976, “Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500” in 1981 and “Information and the Crisis Economy” in 1984.

Widely translated, Schiller’s work had an important impact in developing countries where the ruling elite attempted to control communication and where U.S. media companies often dominated international media markets.

“Herbert Schiller was a media intellectual on a global scale,” Kaarle Nordenstreng, president of the International Assn. for Mass Communication Research, said through UC San Diego. “His ideas traveled well in the divided world of the East, West and South.”

Schiller is survived by his wife of 53 years, Anita; two sons, Dan and Zach, and two grandchildren.