Page 114 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

journalist Forcella expressed this particularly well in a 1959 essay titled
“Millecinquecento lettori”–“Fifteen hundred readers”:

A political journalist, in our country, can count on fifteen hun-
dred readers: the ministers and subsecretaries (all of them), mem-
bers of parliament (some), party and trade union leaders, the top
clergy and those industrialists who want to show themselves well-
informed. The rest don’t count, even if a newspaper sells three
hundred thousand copies. First of all it is not clear whether the
common readers read the first page of the paper, and in any
case their influence is minimal. The whole system is organized
around the relation of the journalist to that group of privileged
readers.
Starting in the 1970s or 1980s, to be sure, all the Mediterranean
countries saw a shift toward a more market-oriented print press. La
Repubblica in Italy, P´ublico in Portugal, El Pa´s, Diario 16 (in the 1970s
ı
and 1980s) and El Peri´odico de Catalunya in Spain, and Lib´eration in
France all have tried aggressively to expand circulations with forms of
journalism that combine the old focus on politics with more human
interest, more feature news, a more graphic presentation, and so on.
Spain and Portugal were among the only countries in the world with
increases in aggregate newspaper circulation in the 1990s. If they are no
longer directed at fifteen hundred readers, however, these papers still
reach affluent, educated minorities with a very particular political and
cultural identity within society (e.g., Delberghe 2000). A look back at
Table 2.1 will confirm that newspaper circulation in the Mediterranean
region remains the lowest in Europe, ranging from 78 copies per thou-
sand population in Greece (for 2000) to 190 per thousand in France.
Two additional characteristics of the press market in the Mediterranean
countries are worth noting. Gender differences in newspaper readership
are quite large, reflecting the closeness of the press to the world of pol-
itics and the traditional exclusion of women from the latter, as well as
historically high rates of female illiteracy (70 percent in Spain in 1910
[Vincent 2000: 10]). Table 2.2 shows Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece
had larger gender differences in newspaper reach than any of the other
countries in this study. In the Spanish case, for example, 47 percent
of men and 26 percent of women reported reading newspapers daily.
Newspaper industries in the Mediterranean region are also highly de-
pendent on newsstand sales rather than subscription – over 90 percent
of papers are sold in newsstands in all of the Mediterranean countries

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