Page 121 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

Italian newspapers have also often taken an activist role, mobiliz-
ing their readers to support political causes and participate in political
events. Of course, this role was central to the party press; but it was never
exclusive to them. Commercial papers as well often include information
on how to get to a political demonstration, and will at times campaign
for political causes. In 1974, to take a particularly dramatic example,
when a key referendum was being held to overturn Italy’snew lawper-
mitting divorce, the entire front page of Il Messaggero was taken up with
the word “No!” Individual journalists often play activist roles; the head
of the journalists’ union led a demonstration protesting the actions of
the police against protestors at the World Trade Organization meeting
in Genoa in 2001.
In Spain and Portugal, the tradition of a pluralistic and politically
engaged press was cut off by dictatorship. In Portugal, it reemerged
dramatically with the revolution of 1974. As the revolution radicalized,
newspapers and radio stations were taken over by politicized journalists;
the Journalists’ Union described their role in these terms:
Newspapers should be defined as organs of anti-fascist, anti-
colonial and anti-imperialist combat, intransigently on the side of
the interests and struggles of laborers, workers, peasants, popular
masses and the exploited (quoted in Agee and Traquina 1984: 13).
Eventually, as political parties developed, newspapers became aligned
with them, and often were funded by parties or by the state – many
newspapers had been owned by banks before the revolution, and became
state property when the banks were nationalized. In the 1980s, however,
state-owned newspapers were privatized, the press and radio indus-
tries moved more into the commercial sphere, and the degree of party-
politicization has declined considerably.
The Spanish transition to democracy was a more gradual, elite-
managed transition. In the absence of fully formed democratic institu-
tions, “media served as conduits for information about the strategy for
politicalchangebeingimplementedbythereformistSu´ arezgovernment,
as well as platforms for the articulation of political demands by newly
emerging political and trade union organizations” (Gunther, Montero,
and Wert 2000: 45). This new pluralist press, the so-called Parlamento de
Papel (Parliament of Paper) emerged in a commercial context, though
ı
with strong political ties. The key event was the launching of El Pa´s by
the commercial media conglomerate PRISA in 1976; “its principal stock-
holdersincludedalltherepresentativesofthepoliticalfamiliesthatwould

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