Page 168 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

the smallest towns, citizens wanted to have their own local newspapers.
High circulation of the local press remains a characteristic feature of
all the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent of other Democratic
Corporatist countries as well (e.g., Germany and Switzerland). “Local
patriotism” in this sense – a high level of civic involvement in local
communities – is tied historically to the fact that liberal institutions de-
veloped strongly in rural areas of Northern Europe as well as in urban
areas: the kind of split between the liberal cities and a countryside where
traditional hierarchical relations or their clientelist successors prevailed,
astheycharacteristicallydidintheMediterraneancountries,didnotexist
in the same way in the Democratic Corporatist countries, nor did strong
urban-rural differences in literacy rates. We will examine the roots and
consequences of this difference more systematically later in this chapter.

BETWEEN MARKET AND PARTISANSHIP

Along with trade, the growth of early newspapers was rooted in the reli-
gious conflicts that followed the Protestant Reformation and the political
conflicts that accompanied the birth of the nation-state. Here we see in
its early form the duality so strongly characteristic of the newspaper in
Northern and Central Europe, as an institution simultaneously of the
market and of political conflict, a source of information for merchants,
and a means of shaping and mobilizing opinion. In Sweden, for ex-
ample, the first regularly appearing newspaper, Ordinari Post Tijdender,
came out in 1645, preceded by Hernes Gothicus in 1624. Both emerged in
the context of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Ordinari Post Tijdender
was “founded at a time when Chancellor Axel Oxensterna, who ruled
the land under Queen Christina’s minority, found it necessary to in-
tensify nationalistic propaganda. Sweden had suffered setbacks in the
Thirty Years War, and morale was low” (Hadenius and Weibull 1999:
129). Salokangas similarly notes that when the Finnish-language press
expanded, in this case quite a bit later in the second half of the nine-
teenth century, it was closely connected with the Finnish nationalist
movement.
The coexistence of media partisanship and mass circulation that char-
acterizesthehistoryofNorthernandCentralEuropeclearlyhaditsorigin
in Protestantism and Calvinism. “Protestants and printers,” as Elisabeth
Eisenstein (1979: 406) observes, “had more in common than Catholics
and printers did.”“Protestantism was the first movement of any kind,
religious or secular, to use the new presses for overt propaganda and

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