Page 150 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

legitimacy. Eisendrath (1982: 79) quotes French sociologist Robert
Escarpit, who founded one of the first schools of journalism, as saying,

Why should we bring out all the facts? This is an ancient country,
with a past full of feuding. Some of us make mistakes; we all live
in glass houses. For instance, I’m from the Resistance. I could walk
down the street in Paris and point out those who collaborated...
who was responsible for deaths. What if I did that? What if we all
did that? How could we all live together as a nation?
Padioleau (1985: 320) quotes a top political editor as saying – in the same
post-Watergate period –“Is it necessary to feed the anti-parliamentarism
of the French with scandals?” Polarized pluralism has also limited the
legitimacy of media institutions, particularly public broadcasting, which
because of the sharpness of ideological cleavages and the unwillingness
of conflicting factions to let it out of their control has always been the
subject of polemics and public scrutiny.
Polarized pluralist systems are typically complex political systems,
with many contending parties, often themselves made up of contend-
ing factions. This results in a public sphere that is structured differently
from the liberal public sphere in which the central element of politi-
cal communication is assumed to be the appeal of political actors to a
mass public of individual citizens. In a multiparty system of this sort,
the most important element of political communication is the process
of bargaining that takes place among parties, factions, and other social
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actors allied with them. Much of this process of communication takes
place outside of the open public sphere, or enters it only tangentially or
in coded, cryptic form. The negotiating process is delicate and messy and
generally succeeds better if carried out informally, outside of the public
arena. The media in such a system – especially newspapers – have histor-
ically served and participated in this process of bargaining. They are an
important means by which elites follow and comment on the progress
of negotiations, establish an agenda, signal positions and commitments,
pressure one another, and arrive at an agreement. Many key characteris-
tics of the media in Southern Europe are connected with this pattern: the
16 Piattoni (2001: 194) associates this pattern also with clientelism, which is discussed
later in this chapter: “In fragmented democracies, political decision-making often
takes the form of ceaseless bargaining, with only minimal agreement on the rules
of the game, and decisions often have the quality of horse-trading. ...” The fact that
agreement on the rules of the game is so limited is one of the key things that divides the
Polarized Pluralist countries from the Democratic Corporatist ones, where bargaining
is also central, but more rule-based.

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