Herb Schiller

Herbert I. Schiller was a communications scholar and media critic who spent three decades making the case that concentrated control of media systems was not a technical problem but a political one, with consequences for democracy, culture, and who gets to speak in public life. He joined the University of California San Diego in 1969 and founded its communications program in 1970, building it into one of the leading centers for critical media studies in the country. His 1969 book Mass Communications and American Empire examined how communications technology served concentrated economic and political power, a thesis that helped shape the UNESCO New World Information and Communication Order debates through the 1970s and early 1980s. His concept of packaged consciousness, the argument that a handful of corporations controlled the creation and circulation of images and information in ways that shaped public belief, gave practitioners across the field language for what they were working against.

That scholarship mattered to community media because the field's core argument, that locally controlled and publicly accessible channels are a democratic necessity, rested on exactly the kind of political economy analysis Herb spent his career developing. The ACM recognized his contribution with the 1992 Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication. He died in La Jolla in January 2000.

Herb's influence on community media was the influence of ideas on a movement: his work named the problem clearly enough that people building alternatives knew what they were building against.