Schiller, Herbert I. Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America. New York: Routledge, 1996. 149 pages.

This little book is an important essay on the two powerful forces that Professor Schiller believes are dominating the social sphere in the 1990s: a freewheeling enterprise system that rejects social accountability, and a privately-owned information apparatus devoted to profit and the avoidance of social criticism. Transnational capitalism is less than a century old, but now that the Cold War is over and labor unions are nearly dead, for the first time it exists without powerful, organized opposition. This has resulted in an information crisis that is characterized by the denial of access to media, and the debasement of messages and images.

The corporate takeover of public expression means that culture has become an industry: book publishing is now in the hands of a few giants, and the line between journalism and public relations is increasingly blurred. The legal system defines corporations as individuals, but in the process of granting First Amendment protection to the transnationals, the expressions of real individuals end up as a mere trickle through tiny, constricted public circuits. "What the record reveals is an almost total takeover of the domestic information system for the purpose of selling goods, services, people, and prefabricated opinion." (page 61)
ISBN 0-415-90765-9

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