Page 137 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

The special case of journalistic autonomy in public broadcasting
should also be noted here. Because public broadcasting in Southern
Europe is controlled fairly closely by the political parties, the role of
the journalist is circumscribed. In the following chapter we will see that
television journalists in many of the Democratic Corporatist countries
shifted during the late 1960s and early 1970s toward a stance more crit-
ical of established political and social institutions. In Italy, by contrast,
even though there was a strong shift in the general culture toward more
critical orientations, a change strongly reflected in the print press, tele-
vision journalists did not play this role. In general, public television
journalists in Italy, as in the other Mediterranean countries, tend to re-
port in a relatively passive way, at least on news bulletins (as opposed
to current affairs programs, where commentary is the rule), a form of
journalism ironically similar in many ways to the very constrained form
of “objective journalism” that prevailed in the United States before the
shift toward more active forms of journalism in the late 1960s. They leave
both agenda setting and the interpretation of political reality to other
political actors, particularly representatives of political parties and other
organized groups, whose comments usually dominate the news (Hallin
and Mancini 1984; on Spain, Gunther, Montero, and Wert 2000). The
primary form of election coverage on Spanish public TV consists of
live reports from the campaigns of the different parties, which leaves
the journalists with minimal roles as mediators. The highly formalized
monitoring of time given to different political actors in Italy and France
also has limited the autonomy of television journalists, though today in
France the CSA enforces the rule of three thirds only loosely.

THE MEDIA AND THE STATE
The state has always played a large role in the social life of Southern
Europe and its role in the media system is no exception. The role of the
state is also complex: it reflects a combination of authoritarian traditions
of intervention and democratic traditions of the welfare state similar to
those that prevail in the Democratic Corporatist countries. It is also
made complex by the fact that the state’s grasp often exceeds its reach:
The capacity of the state to intervene effectively is often limited by lack
of resources, lack of political consensus, and clientelist relationships that
diminish its capacity for unified action.
Through much of history, of course, that state has played the role of
censor. The direct authoritarian control of the years of dictatorship is

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