Page 109 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

industry at one time, and early newspapers developed there as they did
in the trading cities of Northern Eurpope. The onset of the Counter-
Reformation, however, undermined the print industry of Venice, which
was eclipsed by Amsterdam as a center of printing (Briggs and Burke
2002: 57–8). In general, the development of the bourgeoisie was weaker
in Southern Europe, and early newspapers were tied more to the aristoc-
racy,whosewealthwasbasedinlandratherthantrade.Theliterarysalons
described in Habermas’s work on the public sphere were attended more
by aristocrats than by the bourgeoisie, and the period of the “literary
public sphere” lasted relatively long in Southern Europe. The world of
journalism described in Balzac’s Illusiones Perdues or Maupassant’s Bel
Ami was frequented to a large extent by aristocrats. The same was true
of Italian journalism in the early nineteenth century (the time when
the “penny papers” were beginning to develop in the United States).
The clergy in Italy, also closely associated with the landholding aristoc-
racy, played a particularly central role (Murialdi 1986; Farinelli et al.
1997). Describing the readership of nineteenth-century Italian newspa-
pers, Ricuperati (1981: 1087) writes, “we find a world of literary people,
that is a public made up of erudites, theologians, university professors,
membersofscientificacademies:astrongandimportantpresenceofcler-
gymen.” Ricuperati estimates that half the journalists working in Italian
newspapersinthisperiodweremembersoftheclergy.Thepurposeofthe
nineteenth-century newspaper in Southern Europe was the expression
of ideas, both literary and political. Balzac described the “press” as
the word adopted to express everything which is published peri-
odically in politics and literature, and where one judges the works
both of those who govern, and of those who write, two ways of
leading men (quoted in Ferenczi 1993: 28).

Scholars across the region describe the origins of journalism in sim-
ilar terms: Alberto Asor Rosa (1981), an Italian historian, speaks of
two filoni (veins) in the history of Italian journalism, the literary and
the political; and Neveu (1991) speaks of a “tropisme litteraire” and a
“tropisme politique” in the history of French journalism (see also Chalaby
1996).
Commercial newspapers did emerge, and newspaper circulation be-
gan to rise in Southern Europe beginning in the 1880s, at the same
time mass circulation newspapers were developing in Northern Europe,
North America, and East Asia. But a true mass-circulation press never
fully emerged in any of the Mediterranean countries. The process went

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