Page 140 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

Mediterranean systems treat the media as a social institution properly
subject to a substantial regulation in the public interest. All but Greece,
for example, have right-of-reply laws for the press, giving people criti-
cized in the media a right of access to answer criticisms against them (all
European Union [EU] countries are required by European law to have
right-of-replylawsforbroadcasting).Mosthavehatespeechregulations–
these are particularly strong in France (Bird 1999) – as well as regula-
tions on political communication during election campaigns, including
bans on paid political advertising in France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy
and regulations on the publication of polls (poll results cannot be pub-
licized, for example, in the week prior to the election in France). Privacy
laws are strong in France, inhibiting investigative reporting, but also pro-
viding recourse for individuals who feel they have been harmed by the
media and, along with the right of reply, providing a substitute through
the legal system to the institution of press councils in the Democratic
Corporatist countries. There are also a variety of regulations affecting
commercial broadcasting in general, though as we shall see in the follow-
ing section they are generally less extensive and less effective than in the
Democratic Corporatist countries. Regulations limiting concentration
of media ownership have also been relatively weak in the Mediterranean
countries. The political alliances media owners have built with politi-
cians and the often extremely close personal relationships among them
are surely a central reason for this.
An important phenomenon in the recent political history of the
Mediterranean countries is the rise of political scandals, a phenomenon
that reflects significant changes in the relation of the media to the
state. The central role of the state in Mediterranean media systems has
historically limited the tendency of the media to play the “watchdog” role
so widely valued in the prevailing liberal media theory. The financial
dependence of media on the state, and the persistence of restrictive
rules on privacy and on the publication of official information have
combined with the intertwining of media and political elites and –
especially in the French case – with a highly centralized state not
prone to “leaks” of information to produce a journalistic culture cau-
tious about reporting information that would be embarrassing to state
officials. This never meant – aside from periods of authoritarianism –
that political criticism and debate were absent from the media, which
would make no sense in polarized pluralist systems where parties with a
wide range of political ideologies contend and their debates are cen-
tral to the content of the news. But investigative reporting and the

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