Page 126 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

party (Bustamante 1989; on election coverage Rospir 1996; Fern´ andez
and Santana 2000). Similar systems prevail with public broadcasting at
the regional level, though the political majority will vary from region
to region. Survey data reported by Gunther, Montero, and Wert (2000)
show that, as with newspaper readerships, viewers of different televi-
sion news programs – on TVE or the various commercial broadcasters –
differ in their political preferences. The same is true with radio listeners.
Spanish radio is characterized by highly polemical political discussion
programs – tertulias – that are widely regarded as having an important
political influence.
France, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are all essentially majoritarian
systems. Italy is a consensus system, and the politicization of broadcast-
ing has taken a different form there. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the
Catholic culture remained dominant in Italian social life and the Chris-
tianDemocratsdominatedItalianpolitics.TheItalianpublicbroadcaster
RAI reflected this Catholic dominance. By the 1970s secularization of
Italian society led to a shift in the political balance; Christian Demo-
cratic dominance was eroded and the Christian Democrats increasingly
had to share power with the so-called “secular parties” and even, to some
extent, with the Communist opposition. Control of RAI shifted from the
government to Parliament and RAI was increasingly integrated into the
lottizzazione by which the parties divided power and resources, though
the government parties continued to have the predominant position
(Chiarenza 2002).
Bythe1980sasystemhademergedthatgavecontrolofthefirstchannel
ofRAItotheChristianDemocrats,RAI2tothesecularparties,andRAI3,
intended originally as a regional channel, to the Communist opposition.
The lottizzazione affected not only appointments to the Administrative
Council of RAI and the heads of the three channels, but appointment
of much of the personnel down through the organization as well as the
allocationoftimeinpublicaffairsprogramming.Thesystemwasactually
a complex mixture of external pluralism – in the sense that the different
politicalforceshadtheir“own”channels–andinternalpluralism,bothin
the sense that RAI was still governed by a common body and in the sense
that each channel still had personnel from a variety of different parties
(Monteleone 1992). News programs on each channel reflected the full
spectrum of Italian political parties: the typical form of television news
reporting in this period was to summarize events and then to present
the comments of the various political parties (Hallin and Mancini 1984).
This is also true in the other Mediterranean countries, even if they don’t

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