Page 169 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

agitation against an established institution. By pamphleteering directed
at arousing popular support and aimed at readers who were unversed in
Latin, the reformers unwittingly pioneered as revolutionaries and rabble
rousers” (Eisenstein 1979: 304; see also Edwards 1994). Protestantism
not only, as we have seen, contributed to the spread of literacy, and thus
to the development of mass-circulation media, but also pioneered the
tradition of using print as a tool for religious and, by extension, polit-
ical and social advocacy. This tradition eventually spread to Catholics,
and beyond the religious into other arenas of social life. Eisenstein also
points out that Protestantism had, in some of its forms at least, a close
affinity to the rationality of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on
debate and critical reasoning. Not much research has been done on this
subject, as far as we are aware, but there is probably a story to be told
about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of journalism, just as there was
about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: habits of discourse
were transferred from religion to the secular public sphere, producing a
cultural model that favored reading, reasoning, diffusing, and defending
one’s own ideas, that encouraged the the lay public “to compare the two
sides, think for themselves, and choose between alternatives instead of
doing as they were told (Briggs and Burke 2002: 81). 5
The Protestant Reformation and the political conflicts it spawned also
left many of the countries of Northern and Central Europe permanently
divided between adherents of different faiths, and these religious differ-
ences were often entangled with political and economic divisions. These
cleavages, in some cases combined with ethnic and linguistic divisions
and in all cases combined after the late nineteenth century with class
divisions, continued to shape media systems – as they did the rest of
social and political life – through most of the twentieth century. One of
the most important characteristic of the Democratic Corporatist coun-
tries is their strong division into political and cultural subcommunities,
a pattern often referred to as segmented pluralism. Media institutions,
like political parties, tended to be rooted in these communities, a fact
that increased the strength of media institutions (as it did of political
parties also) and preserved the tradition of an ideologically plural press
with strong advocacy functions.
The most obvious example of segmented pluralism is the pillarization
(“verzuiling”)ofDutchsocietydescribedinLijphart’s(1968)well-known

5
Perhaps another literate culture also prevalent in Central Europe – the Jewish –
contributed to this cultural environment, as well.

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