Page 142 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

and often emotional news coverage, public opinion assumed the role of
the “incorruptible judge” theorized by Jeremy Bentham, and judges were
able to produce changes that would have been inconceivable in an earlier
era of Italian politics. Both the judiciary and the media became more
powerful in relation to the political parties, as both claimed to speak for a
public opinion that transcended partisanship. In Spain, as we have seen,
Diario 16 and later El Mundo played an important role in revealing both
financial scandals similar to Tangentopoli and a scandal involving extra-
legal actions against radical Basque nationalists. 13 In the Spanish case,
investigative reporting was more closely tied to party politics in the sense
that media revealed scandals about their partisan enemies. Nevertheless
it clearly made the media more central as a political actor than in the
past.
In all of the Mediterranean countries there is an increased tendency to
frame events as moral scandals, and for journalists to present themselves
as speaking for an outraged public against the corrupt political elite.
These changes are not unique to the Mediterranean countries. They are
connected with the growth of powerful, market-based media, with a
cultural shift toward “critical professionalism” in journalism, and with a
deeply rooted decline of traditional loyalties to political parties, the dy-
namics of which we will explore in more general terms in Chapter 8. The
changes have, however, been particularly dramatic in the Polarized
Pluralist countries, given the historically close relations between the
media and the state.

“SAVAGE DEREGULATION”
Traquina (1995, 1997) refers to Portuguese media policy in the 1980s
and 1990s as one of “savage deregulation.” His argument is that Portugal
introduced commercial broadcasting in an uncontrolled way, without
imposing significant public-service obligations on commercial broad-
casters and without any framework that would protect the interests pub-
lic broadcasting systems were intended to serve: providing information
to citizens about public affairs, providing access to a wide range of po-
litical views, promoting the national language and culture, encouraging
national audio-visual production, and so on. Portugal eliminated the
license fee for public broadcasting in 1991. Patterns of development of

13
The media in the Mediterranean, as also in the Democratic Corporatist countries,
have stayed away from the kinds of scandal about politicians’ personal lives that are
common in the Liberal countries. In Southern Europe, sex is not a scandal!

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