Page 171 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

them, and the strength of the institutions they built encouraged the
development of a press that would reach an almost capillary diffusion
among group members, for whom reading the paper was essential to
being part of their religious, political, and/or ethnic community. As
Hadenius and Weibull (1999: 135) write for the Swedish case, “Links
between papers and political parties also meant that newspaper read-
ing spread among most social groupings. For example, trade unions
urged their members to read party-affiliated papers, thus establishing
regular reading habits among the working class.” In Sweden volun-
tary associations for newspaper development were established by parties
and other social and religious organizations at the end of the nineteenth
century.
The extent and the forms of “segmented pluralism” vary consider-
ably among the Democratic Corporatist countries. But in all of them
organized social groups have played a central role in the structuring of
social, political, and cultural life, and important parts of the media sys-
tem have been closely connected to them: the press has developed as an
instrument of identification and organization within social groups, and
of discussion, comparison, and conflict among them. In Finland, for ex-
˚
ample, the first paper Abo Tidningar, founded in 1771, represented the
Swedish elite in Turku, which at that time ruled Finland. Five years later
the first Finnish-language paper appeared, also in Turku; and the press
of the nationalist Finnish movement of the beginning of the following
century became an organizational tool to free the country from Swedish
occupation. In reaction to this attempt the Swedish community further
developed its own press (Salokangas 1999).
In Belgium, partisanship has simultaneously involved ethnic-
linguistic, religious, and ideological divisions. Not only did a Flemish
press and a French press exist, but within these there were distinctions
based on political affiliation: Catholic, socialist, and liberal papers with
strong ties to political parties existed into the 1990s (Burgelman 1989).
In Switzerland, of course, the press has always been linked to the different
linguistic groups, though the level of intergroup conflict has not been as
sharp as in other countries with linguistic divisions.
In Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, where religious or
ethnic divisions have historically been less important, political partisan-
ship rooted in social class and ideology is central, and newspapers have
been tied to parties and unions. “It was clearly quite impossible for a
party to exist without the support of a press in the form of news cov-
erage and concurring editorial opinion,” as Gustafsson and Hadenius

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