Business As Usual : How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century / Caroline Jack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jack, Caroline.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Capitalism--United States.

Capitalism.

Mass media--Political aspects--United States.

Mass media.

United States--Economic conditions.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (277 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Left to Perish in Debris

Chapter one. The Contradictions of Economic Education

Chapter two. Selling America to Americans

Chapter three. Expertise and Affirmation

Chapter four. The Great Free Enterprise Campaign

Chapter five. The New Economics

Chapter six. From Institutions to Markets

Chapter seven. The Triumphs of Economic Education

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226835136

0226835138

OCLC:

1463310026