Page 165 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

Hadenius and Weibull note (132), “were not strong enough to stop the
paper.”
Sweden was the first country in the world to establish the principles
of publicity and press freedom. Its constitution of 1766 recognized both
the right of access to official documents and the freedom of the press.
Setbacks would take place in certain periods, but over the long run
Sweden moved toward a legal system that favored the right of citizens
to participate in political life and valued the free flow of information as
essential to this end – clearly favorable conditions for the development of
the press. Other Northern European countries also were relatively early
to establish freedom of the press: Norway did so in 1814 (Wolland 1993),
the Netherlands in 1815 (van Lenthe and Boerefijn 1993), Denmark in
1848 (Søllinge 1999). Belgium recognized freedom of the press in its
constitution of 1831 and abolished the so-called taxes on knowledge
in 1848 (Van Gomple 1998), a few years before Britain. Press freedom
came later in Austria (1867) and Germany, where conflicts between the
press and state censors were common until 1874 when, under Bismarck,
a Reichspressegesetz (Imperial Press Law) eliminated prior censorship
and made possible the birth of national newspapers (Sandford 1976;
Humphreys 1994).
These legislative milestones clearly accelerated the growth of the press,
but they also reflected the fact that newspaper circulations already had
grown considerably as market institutions, civil society, and the nation
state had gradually developed. The first “corantos,” the forerunners of
the modern newspaper, came out in the urban centers – Amsterdam,
2
where the first coranto was probably issued as early as 1607, Cologne,
Frankfurt, and Antwerp. These cities were situated along Europe’s main
commercial routes and demand was strong not only for economic and
commercial news but also for political news that might affect commerce.
Habermas (1989: 16) stresses this point in his account of the origin of
the public sphere:

With the expansion of trade, merchants’ market-oriented calcula-
tions required more frequent and more exact information about
distant events. . . . The great trade cities became at the same time
centers for the traffic in news; the organization of this trafficon
a continuous basis became imperative to the degree to which the
exchange of commodities and securities became continuous.

2
The first newsletters in English were printed in Amsterdam and exported to England
in 1620 (Clark 1994: 6).

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