Page 146 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV/INL P2: GCV
0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 20, 2004 17:24

The Three Models

institutions, as Carr (1980) says of Spain, were imposed “on an eco-
nomically and socially ‘backward’ and conservative society.” Industrial-
ism and the market were developed only to a limited extent, and their
growth would continue to be slow and uneven through the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. In 1930 47 percent of the working popula-
tion of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece was still engaged in agriculture,
as compared with 20 percent in Germany. France stood in between, at
29 percent agricultural (Malefakis 1995: 41). At the time liberalism was
introduced, with the Napoleonic invasion, social and political structures
were essentially feudal and patrimonial in character, based on landed
property and an absolutist state, albeit one with weak penetration into
the countryside. Cultural life was dominated by the Church. The social
forces that would form the political constituency for liberalism – the in-
dustrial and commercial bourgeoisie and the urban working and middle
classes – were relatively weak. In Greece, a similar importation of liberal
institutions began in 1821, when Turkish rule was overthrown, and lib-
eral ideas introduced by exiled nationalist leaders “unavoidably clashed
with a pre-existing institutional setting characterized by a pre-capitalist,
underdeveloped economy, a patrimonial structure of political controls,
and the anti-enlightenment, anti-western ideology of the Christian Or-
thodox Church” (Mouzelis 1995). In France, the sociological base for the
development of liberal institutions was considerably stronger, though
French history is characterized by sharper conflict between tradition
and modernity than that of most of the Liberal and Democratic Corpo-
ratist countries. The late, uneven and conflictual development of liberal
institutions in Southern Europe is fundamental to understanding the
development of the media in this region.
The weakness of liberal social and economic institutions, firstofall,
limited the development of the mass circulation press. The counteren-
lightenment tradition discouraged the development of literacy, and the
cultures of Southern Europe can probably still be said to remain oral
cultures to a larger extent than those of Northern Europe and North
America. Limited development of the market economy restricted both
the resources available to commercial newspapers and the need for the
kind of information-oriented content that was crucial to their social
function elsewhere: in a market economy publicly circulated informa-
tion on prices, technology, legal regulations, and political and business
developments on a national and international scale are crucial. In tra-
ditional economies information flows are more private and more lo-
cal. Political instability and repression also made the development of

128