Page 141 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

exposure of corruption, incompetence, and conflict of interest were
indeed rare.
This changed dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, as most of the
Mediterranean countries experienced numerous political scandals. In
the Italian case the Tangentopoli or “bribe city” scandal, which involved
revelations of bribes paid by businessmen and corporations to most
prominent politicians, produced a radical change of the political struc-
ture of Italian democracy, with the disappearance of almost all of the
parties that ruled Italy for half a century – the Christian Democratic,
Socialist, Liberal, and Republican parties – and the imprisonment of
many important political leaders. The exact dynamics of these scandals,
and the role of the media in them, varies from country to country. But
in all cases it involves important changes in the relation of the media
to the state: media become less deferential and their relations with po-
litical elites more adversarial. In the French case, the exposure by Le
Monde of the role of the French State in an attack on the Greenpeace
ship the Rainbow Warrior, which was protesting French nuclear testing
in the Pacific, is often seen as a watershed event in the shift toward a
less deferential attitude toward the state. It came against the background
of heightened competition between Le Monde and Liberati´on,atatime
when Le Monde, whose prestige had been based in part on its role as
the main oppositional newspaper when the Right was in power, was in
danger of being seen as an “official” paper under a Socialist government.
Information on this sort of affair had previously been published outside
ı
the mainstream press, usually by the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaˆn´ e
(as it was published in Spain for a while by the soft-porn magazine
Intervi´u).
In Italy, the scandals have been driven less by investigative reporting
on the part of journalists than by judges – in the case of Tangentopoli a
group of activist judges from Milan – who have used the media to build
support for their investigations (Pizzorno 1998). 12 Though the media
did not initiate the revelations, their role was clearly important. From
early in the scandal, almost all journalists took sides with the judges
against the “corrupt political class” that ruled Italy. Through extensive
12 In France, too, the rise of investigative journalism is partly due to the arrival, at the
end of the 1960s, of “new generations of investigating magistrates (juges d’instruction),
(the ‘red judges’), who more often came from the middle classes and as carriers of
‘68er’ attitudes, were more focused on human rights” (Marchetti 2000: 31). These
judges organized, insisted on greater autonomy of the judicial system relative to the
political parties, and carried out many investigations that provided fertile ground for
the growth of scandal-centered journalism.

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