Page 159 - 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 Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

concentrate rather narrowly on the activities of party elites. A common
concern of media critics in Liberal systems has been the prevalence of
the strategic or game frames in political reporting, which focus on the
strategies of political elites and their success or failure in playing the po-
litical game, at the expense of the policy concerns that motivate ordinary
citizens. The media in Mediterranean systems show this tendency even
more strongly. Our comparative content analysis of political reporting
in French and U.S. papers showed 10.8 percent of New York Times sto-
ries emphasizing a “political game” frame, as against 21.7 percent in Le
Monde and 23.6 percent in Le Figaro. Italian media similarly emphasize
the political game over policy issues, giving enormous attention to the
negotiations among the parties, the rise and fall of particular leaders and
factions, and the like. (Mancini 1996; Marletti 1985). We should keep in
mind, of course, that Italian political coalitions are typically fragile and
are constantly being remade.
Does the close relation of the media to political institutions – and
particularly to party elites – in the Polarized Pluralist system mean that
the public sphere is less open? Little research is available that bears on
this question, but what there is suggests that the answer is probably
“no”– that there is no general tendency for the public sphere in Polarized
Pluralist systems to be less open. Sampedro (1997), for example, exam-
ined coverage in the Spanish media of the movement against compulsory
military service, which reached its peak with extensive civil disobedience
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because social movements involve the
attempt of groups outside the political establishment to put an issue on
thepoliticalagenda,mediacoverageofsocialmovementsisanimportant
test of the democratic performance of a media system. Sampedro’sstudy
was not comparative, but easily lends itself to comparison with simi-
lar studies in the Liberal countries. Certain elements of what he found
were clearly different from what one would find particularly in North
America, most notably the fact that partisan differences among newspa-
pers were strongly reflected in the news agenda, the use of sources, and
other elements of coverage. ABC, for instance, had privileged access to
ı
sources in the Defense Ministry, while El Pa´s had such access to Justice
Ministry sources. The conscientious objectors’ movement had difficulty
for quite some time penetrating the news agenda. Once it reached a
certain threshold – in part by disrupting social order through civil dis-
obedience, and in part because it provoked divisions within the political
elite – it garnered extensive and quite pluralistic coverage for a period of
time, again tied in part to the existence of “a diversity of communication

141