Page 15 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS
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                                                         Preface












                              We don’t remember exactly when the idea of this book was born. Proba-
                              bly at the moment we were finishing our first joint enterprise, “Speaking
                              of the President,” which was published in 1984, we already had a strong
                              sense that this kind of research was extremely promising and that we
                              should try to do it more systematically and on a broader scale. Little
                              by little, through other experiences of comparative studies on particu-
                              lar subjects, we conceived the idea of this project. Briefly, what we have
                              set out to do is to find out whether it is possible to identify systematic
                              connections between political and mass media structures. We were cu-
                              rious, in particular, whether it made sense to think in terms of distinct
                              models of journalism and of the media-politics relationship. This has
                              been an ambition in the field of communication since Four Theories of
                              the Press, and it also seemed to us, as we began to survey the variety
                              of media systems in Western Europe and North America, that there
                              really were clusters of media system characteristics that tended to co-
                              occur in distinct patterns. We introduce a schema centered around
                              three models of journalism and media institutions in the pages that
                              follow – though with plenty of qualifications about the variation that
                              exists within and between actual media systems belonging to these three
                              models. We have tried to carry out this effort at comparative analysis
                              empirically, without having in mind any ideal professional model of
                              reference against which other systems would be measured – eschewing
                              the normatively centered approach that, as we will argue in the pages
                              that follow, has held back comparative analysis in communication. At
                              the same time, we will try in this book to assess weaknesses and strengths
                              of each media system model as a support for democracy; this much of
                              the normative orientation of communication theory is certainly worth
                              maintaining.


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