Diana Lemberg. Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 304 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-18217-1, $26.00 (paper); ISBN 978-0-231-18216-4, $60.00 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-231-54403-0, $25.99 (e-book).

Abstract

Writing before COVID-19 and the resulting stresses on the production, distribution, and consumption of digital information media, Diana Lemberg nonetheless offers an essential and fruitful history of predigital information media and the creation of an international, privatized “marketplace of ideas” in this short American century Lemberg’s analysis and narrative, while certainly informed by Paul Lazarsfeld, mass communication studies, and the likes of Timothy Glander’s Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications (2000), takes on mass communication and propaganda as a global phenomenon mediated by global bureaucratic organizations, not primarily as a domestic concern Within UNESCO, European countries raised concerns over the unequal distribution of resources like newsprint in the years just after World War II;in 1950, UNESCO found that the United States consumed 60 percent of the world’s newsprint (54)