By Christine Ogan, Indiana University

Herbert Schiller, internationally known media critic and political economist and inspiration to numerous international communication scholars, died at the age of 80 in a care center in La Jolla, California on Jan. 29, 2000. He had suffered from a lung ailment and had other health problems in recent years.

Relentless in his attack on corporate greed and cultural and media imperialism, he was writing up to the end of his life. His literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, has reported that his last manuscript, Living in the Number One Country: Reflections from a Critic of American Empire, will be published in May by Seven Stories Press.

His early works, Mass Communications and American Empire in 1969, and The Mind Managers in 1973 set the stage for his lifelong attention to the imposition of U.S. cultural ideology on other countries (particularly those in the Third World), and control of worldwide media markets. Based on his critical writing, many media scholars were prompted to empirically test his generalizations about cultural and media imperialism. The trend in scholarly work inspired by Schiller continues to this day. He was author, co-author or editor of at least 15 books and hundreds of book chapters and articles. The most recent book, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, published in 1996, where he addressed important issues related to the information highway, data deprivation, and other digital divide inequities.

According to the obituary that appeared in his home town paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, he was known for the "informality and wit of his classroom lectures." He founded the communications program at the University of California at San Diego in 1970. His graduate course that was reportedly designed for 25 students regularly enrolled about 80 or 90.

Schiller grew up in New York City, the son of a jeweler whose business failed during the depression. He received all of his degrees from New York schools: a B.A. in economics from City College; a masterÍs degree from Columbia in 1941 and a Ph.D. from New York University. He taught economics to artists at the Pratt Institute in the 1950s, then moved to the University of Illinois where he became interested in media issues. In 1969 he took a position at UCSD, where he spent the rest of his career

LondonÍs Guardian newspaper characterized him as a premier critic of American media practice and policy. "Handsome, tall and angular, he was a popular speaker. Arms flailing, and possessed of a passionate but sardonic humor, he lectured at his best without notes. This talent was wonderfully exploited in a Public Service Broadcasting television series, Herb Schiller Reads The New York Times in which he presented an alternative account of the dayÍs news straight to camera." (continued on p. 7)

Geert Lovink, a journalist and writer living in Amsterdam, interviewed Schiller during a conference on the Internet & Politics in Munich on February 20, 1997. In that interview, Schiller expressed his concern about the growing trend in corporate control of the Internet, following the pattern of broadcasting. "Everything you will discover in the areas of television and film will come back in the Net. The patterns are going to be very similar. We are nowhere near to what they like to call an information society. This term serves to camouflage what the current reality is. The talk about the ïnewÍ keeps the present level left aside. We are living in a period of innocence and bankrupcy of values. People are desperately looking for meaning, identity, ethnicity, gender."

Herbert Schiller is survived by his wife, Anita; and two sons, Dan (also a professor of communictions at UCSD) and Zach. Contributions to the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) fund may be made in Herbert Schillerâs name, 130 W. 25th St., New York City, NY 10001.