Page 102 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

If it is very difficult to say whether power is more or less equally
distributed in different media systems, a bit more can be said about
how power works in different systems. Within the Democratic Corpo-
ratist countries, for example, the relation of media to organized social
groups has historically been extremely important, while in the Liberal
countries both market forces (e.g., that make the media more respon-
sive to some segments of the audience than to others) and routines by
whichjournalistsinteractwithindividualpoliticalactorshavebeenmore
central. One important general distinction is worth raising here. In neo-
Marxist state theory a distinction was introduced in the 1970s between
“structuralist” and “instrumentalist” theories of the state (e.g., Jessop
4
1982; Block 1987). Instrumentalist theories were those that focused on
power exercised by particular actors, usually in a conscious and direct
way, through threats, inducements, personal ties, and the like. Struc-
turalist theories were those that focused on impersonal mechanisms or
structures that biased the political process, giving actors unequal access
or constraining the outcome of the political process without necessarily
5
requiring intervention by any particular actor. “Structuralist” theories
of the state also tended to emphasize the “relative autonomy” of the state
fromsocialclassesandotheractors,stressingthatthestatetendedtooper-
ate to a significant extent by a logic of its own, rather than being governed
purely by the logics of other social spheres – particularly the economic
logic of relations between social classes. This literature generally treated
structuralist theories as more sophisticated than instrumentalist ones,
which were seen as simple-minded “conspiracy” theories. Most of this
literature, however, focused on the experience of North American and
Northern European systems; in other contexts instrumentalist theories
might be perfectly adequate.
A similar distinction is probably useful in the study of the media. The
Polarized Pluralist countries, as we have seen, tend to be characterized
by a relatively high degree of instrumentalization of the media. Instru-
mentalization certainly is not absent in the Liberal and Democratic Cor-
poratist systems; the political role of Rupert Murdoch in Britain, Conrad

4 These works describe the so-called Poulantzas-Miliband debate of the 1970s. Miliband
(1969) included an early but not unsophisticated Marxist analysis of the role of media
in the system of political power.
5 This distinction is connected with the distinction Lukes (1974) makes among three
“faces” of power: power exercised directly by actors with greater access to resources,
power that results from biases in institutional structure, and power that results from
effects of the dominant culture.

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