Communication, commerce, and power: United States foreign communication policy and the direct broadcast satellite, 1962-1993

Since 1945, the 'free flow of information' has been the central principle informing U.S. foreign communication policy. In the context of the relative economic decline of the United States since the late-1960s, information-based commodity activities gradually were recognised to be the country's most promising competitive sector. Also during these years, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) technologies became available. Their most apparent significance involved their unprecedented capacity to penetrate international markets with information-based commodities, and their prospective 'cultural-power' applications.;According to the dominant paradigm informing existing critical scholarship of this history--Herbert I. Schiller's 'cultural imperialism' perspective--the development and implementation of DBS should have been of great interest to U.S. public sector officials. However, this was not the case. Scholars working within this paradigm generally have not addressed this inconsistency and related problems in a sustained and detailed way. This dissertation is a response to this neglect. It examines the historical forces shaping the retardation of U.S.-based DBS developments. It asks why this occurred during a period in which the American state was vigorously promoting free flow of information principles?;Using primary documents and other sources, this question is assessed by focusing on the forces and processes shaping U.S. policy. Complex state, private sector and international interests and relationships are revealed. Rather than an automatic assertion of free flow policy through existing agencies, hegemonic crisis generated private sector-directed reforms of the American state itself. In the 1980s, this took place through the ascendancy of the Office of the United States Trade Representative, enabling the American state to reform international institutions. Free flow subsequently was applied in the guise of 'free trade'.;In keeping with the work of Robert W. Cox and others, this study suggests that researchers using the cultural imperialism paradigm should conceptualise the American state as a complex medium, best analysed as a structural entity that, in crisis periods, itself must be restructured. This insight constitutes an essential analytical corrective for future research involving both foreign communication policy and the hegemonic capacities of the United States.