Page 157 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

world of politics. Once democracy was consolidated, a high degree of
political parallelism prevailed, with the media serving to represent the
wide range of political forces that contended for influence, both in their
bargaining with one another and in their efforts to consolidate their own
political voices. The commercial press did not develop as strongly as in
either the Liberal or Democratic Corporatist systems. Newspaper cir-
culation remained relatively low and electronic media correspondingly
central. Broadcasting too has tended to be party-politicized, with France
moving away from that pattern in the 1980s. Journalistic professionalism
is less developed than in the Liberal or Democratic Corporatist systems,
with political loyalties often superseding commitments to common pro-
fessional norms and institutions. Instrumentalization of the media by
the state, parties, and private owners with political ties is relatively com-
mon. The state has tended to play an interventionist role in many ways,
though clientelism and political polarization have often undercut its
effectiveness as a regulator, except in France.
The media of the Mediterranean countries deviate in many ways from
the dominant liberal norm of neutral professionalism and a “watchdog”
media, and many accounts of these systems are quite negative in tone
(e.g., Padovani and Calabrese 1996; Hibberd 2001), just as, in general,
Southern Europe has often been judged as deficient in relation to the
norm of Western development. It therefore seems inevitable to confront
someofthenormativequestionsabouttheroleofthemediainthedemo-
cratic process in Southern Europe in closing this chapter. The point here
is not to make any sort of final judgment about whether Mediterranean
systems are ultimately better or worse then the systems of North America
or the rest of Western Europe. It is not clear that it makes sense to judge
media systems by any kind of standard abstracted from the historical
conditions in which they function, and in any case, the kind of com-
parative research that would be needed to make real judgments about
media performance across systems has been done only to a very limited
extent. So our purpose here is only to clarify some of the similarities
and differences in their democratic functions that might be relevant to
making such judgments.
In the first place, it should be kept in mind that all of the countries of
Southern Europe are in important ways success stories in the late twenti-
ethcentury:all emergedfromverydifficult circumstances politically and
economically to consolidate democratic political systems and to narrow
dramaticallytheeconomicgapthatseparatedthemfromtherestofWest-
ern Europe earlier in the century. There are certainly many aspects of

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