Page 101 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Media and Political Systems and Differentiation

are pluralist, democratic systems. In each, a wide variety of political par-
ties, social groups and movements (both organized and unorganized),
individuals and institutions compete for voice and power, and the me-
dia systems reflect, incorporate, and shape this pluralism in a variety of
ways. At the same time, all are systems of power. In each system, there
are structured inequalities in the relations among these actors; some
have much greater access to resources or are better positioned to exercise
influence than others. The media must be seen not only as part of a
process of democratic competition but also as a part of this structure of
power. Alongside the conventional wisdom about the superiority of the
Liberal Model, there is also a tendency for media critics in each system
to believe that the grass is surely greener on the other side of the fence.
Thus in the Liberal countries, media critics often look to the Democratic
Corporatistsystem–particularlytoScandinavia,withitstraditionofme-
dia tied to organized social groups – as a more democratic alternative to
the commercial media that dominate their own system. But what British
or Americans might see as a wonderful form of pluralism, the Scandi-
navian researchers will see more as a form of control of the media by the
elites of established interests in society. Critics in the Polarized Pluralist
countries, meanwhile, will look to the “watchdog” press of the Liberal
system as more democratic, while scholars in the Liberal countries see
the same commercial forces and professional routines as constraints that
limit news coverage within relatively narrow ideological bounds. There
are, no doubt, complex patterns of difference in which kinds of groups
or ideas will have access and which will have dominance and under what
conditions. These would be very important to study, given the limited
state of research in the area; however, we will only be able to touch on
these differences in the pages that follow. We are very skeptical, however,
of the idea that the three models could be arranged into any kind of
hierarchy of openness of the public sphere. We are also skeptical that
convergence toward the Liberal Model can be seen as a separation of
media from systems of power. As we shall see in Chapter 8, it is possi-
ble that the disruption of the old bonds between media and organized
social groups that characterized much of Europe would lead to greater
imbalance in the representation of social interests, rather than greater
openness and diversity.
the “Anglo-American” tradition of quantitative empirical research, which generally
stays away from questions of power, is probably more dominant in a lot of continental
Europe than in English-speaking countries, where the “critical” tradition has been a
significant influence since the 1970s.

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