Page 122 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

govern during the transition to democracy” (Gunther, Montero, and
ı
Wert 2000: 45). El Pa´s was joined several months later by Diario 16.
In the transition period, an advocacy orientation was common among
Spanish journalists, who often saw it as their role to promote the new
democratic regime and to oppose Francoism. Canel, Rodriguez, and
S´ anchez (2000: 128–32) and Canel and Piqu´ e (1998) found that in the
late 1990s 40 to 50 percent of Spanish journalists still considered it an im-
portant part of the journalists role to “promote certain values and ideas”
and to “influence the public”; advocacy orientations were most common
among older journalists who had worked during the transition period.
While political parallelism has declined in most of Europe in the last
decades of the twentieth century, it is reasonable to argue that it has
increased in the new Spanish democracy, resulting in a division of most
of the media into two rival camps. In this sense there is a parallel with
the Italian case, where media partisanship has also increased in recent
years. When the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) came to power
in 1982, ending the initial phase of transition to democracy, PRISA,
which also included the most important radio network, publishing, and
eventually television interests, became fairly closely aligned with the
new governing elite, as its owner was an important advisor to President
Felipe Gonz´ alez. Eventually an opposition camp began to form around
the traditional conservative newspaper ABC (historically associated with
the monarchist movement), the Church-owned radio network COPE,
and a new newspaper, El Mundo, which was formed in 1989 following a
conflict within Diario 16 and was read while the PSOE was in power by
supporters of the two principal opposition groupings, the conservative
Partido Popular (PP) and Izquierda Unida (IU), the United Left, whose
core is the Communist Party. Gunther, Montero, and Wert (2000) report
figures from a Spanish election survey – reproduced in Table 5.3 – that
show that in Spain, as in Italy, the readerships of national newspapers
continue to reflect political divisions. El Mundo built its popularity as
an opposition newspaper to a significant extent by breaking a series
of scandals involving PSOE finances and human-rights violations in the
waragainstBasqueterrorists,andGunther,Montero,andWertalsoshow
that readers of El Mundo and ABC were much more likely to consider
corruption a serious problem than readers of El Pa´s.
ı
Both media partisanship and government pressures increased as elec-
tions became increasingly competitive in the 1990s. After 1996, when the
Partido Popular came to office, media grouped around PRISA became
the opposition camp. A progovernment camp formed around El Mundo,

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