Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Cloth: 978-0-226-83512-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-83514-3 | eISBN: 978-0-226-83513-6
Library of Congress Classification HB501.J25 2024
See other books on: Business | Capitalism | Mass media | Twentieth Century | Usual
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Cloth: 978-0-226-83512-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-83514-3 | eISBN: 978-0-226-83513-6
Library of Congress Classification HB501.J25 2024
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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, 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.
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, 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.
See other books on: Business | Capitalism | Mass media | Twentieth Century | Usual
See other titles from University of Chicago Press
