The Reformist Posture

Acceptance and revision is a posture that is fitting to the "reformist"' scenario, as we define that perspective in our article. ¹⁴ Professor Herbert Schiller is essentially faithful to the reformist platform, as he accepts our portrayal of the pervasive and startling effects of the commercial electronic entertainment industry and proposes a regulatory role for government to curtail these effects. What is vital to Schiller's reformist view, in stark contrast to the view of the modernist, is the premise of his first­amendment theory: "contemporary capitalism's elaborate and sophisticated message­making apparatus"' is responsible "for the appalling state of what now passes for democratic discourse."' ¹⁵ In this premise, Schiller acutely perceives what several of our colleagues do not­­the integral relationship between commerce and communication. ¹⁶ He well appreciates that today the unchecked forces of capitalism encourage the exploitation of highly advanced electronic technology to degrade traditional first­amendment values.

Schiller is puzzled, however, by the emphasis that we place on the "'subjective factor,"' the public's obsession with self­amusement. ¹⁷ He suggests that in doing so we level blame primarily on the victim, the public, for the trivialization of democratic discourse. ¹⁸ Rather, as our article stresses, it is the combination of commercial exploitation and the age­old drive for self­gratification that most threatens freedom of speech in America in the 1990s. We address a complex phenomenon of mutually interactive forces: a public weaned on entertainment feeds an industry that, in turn, feeds the public entertainment culture. ¹⁹ In the brave new world, the captains of power dispense soma tablets, which the public is hungry to devour.

Without focusing, as we have, on the psyche of the American people, Schiller's reformist proposal may prove ineffectual. Requiring corporations to take responsibility for the dreadful state of public discourse, Schiller considers unplugging the first­amendment cord from the commercial amusement industry. But is it possible to eliminate the Supreme Court's corporation­as­ person doctrine without accounting for the ideology of the private corporationist state that America was, is, and continues to be? Even putting aside the need for judicial line drawing among types of corporations, could this reformist view take hold in an ever­increasing corporationist and consumerist America? As Professor Lerner deftly captures the point: "A capitalist culture cannot exist without capitalist values." ²⁰ Hence, "'[w]hen the ends are the bottom line, the means become a profit nexus and a money ethic.'" ²¹

Much more than first­amendment doctrine must change­­and change radically, we think­­before Professor Schiller's reformist solution to the paratroopers' paradox can become a realistic one. Though not expressly, Schiller's reform may be less a jurisprudential program for resolving our first­amendment dilemma than a political program for fundamental redesign of American society. ²²