Overview

How corporations used mass media to teach Americans that capitalism was natural and patriotic, exposing the porous line between propaganda and public service. Business as Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls ""sponsored economic education media."" These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to ""sell America to Americans,"" found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of ""free enterprise"" under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.

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9780226835129

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“Business as Usual is anything but. This sharp-eyed media history lifts the lid on the twentieth-century fight to bend our imaginations to the will of capital. Think ‘Duck and Cover’ for the C-suite set. You’ll be surprised at every turn—by the stories and by the lessons they offer for our digital era.”  -- Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

Author Information

Caroline Jack is assistant professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego.

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