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e in other parts of the world aspire, resulting in'the phenomenally successful extension of marketing and consumerism to theworld community' (Schiller, 1996, p. 115). Third, Schiller argued that theeconomic power of the ECI sector, combined with the global reach of culturalcommodities and media messages, led to criltiiral inrperinlisnz. In
Connn~aricatio~anr d Ctllt~iraDl ottritiatio~z,S chiller defined cultural imperialismin the following terms:
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Theories of Global Media 33
The concept of cultural imperialism ... describes the sum of processes by which a
society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is
attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social instit~~tiotnos
correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominant centre of
the system. (Schiller, 1976, p. 9)
In terms of the relationship between media, power and culture, the critical
political economy perspective has engaged in two critical dialogues. The first
is with liberal-pluralist media theories. In manifestations that vary from the
'modernization' theories popularised in the 1960s (Lerner, 1958; Schmmrn,
1964) to current thinking about the impact of American 'soft power' as a
force for consensus in the global political economy (for example, Nye, 2004),
critical political economists have argued that such models have been fundamentally
flawed by their exclusion of media and comn~unications research
from a br,oader consideration of structures of economic, political and cultural
power (see Mattelart, 1994, pp. 147-64; Thussu, 2006, pp. 42-50 for a
summary of these debates).
The second dialogue, and in many respect the more complex one, has been
with Marxism. Marxism has at a general level put forward the proposition
that the realm of culture and ideas cannot be understood independently of the
political and economic forces that shape it and iiltimately constrain it. This is
why the concept of ideology is so central to a Marxist theory of culture. Two
key variants of this argument can be found from the work of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels. The first, and perhaps the most influential, was developed by
Marx in The Gerllzarz Ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas i.e. the class which
is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at
the same time over the means of mental production ... The ruling ideas are nothing
more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships. (quoted in
Barrett, 1991, p. 9)
Perhaps the boldest and most prominent rehtemcnt of the 'ruling class = ruling
ideology' equation has been in the propaganda l i~odeol f media developed byNoam Chomsky and Edward Herman (Chomsky and Herrnan, 1988).
Chomsky and Herman proposed that the United States media largely functionedthrough a class-based monopoly of ideas, whereby 'money and power are ableto filter