Page 173 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

In Germany and Austria, as in Scandinavia, partisanship was linked
primarily to ideology and social class, more than to religion or ethnic-
ity. Liberal and radical papers (including the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,
one of whose founders was Karl Marx) emerged with the revolution of
1848, and Social Democratic papers were founded starting in the 1860s,
Vorw¨arts, founded in 1876, being the most important. The German jour-
nalist in this period was a “publicist,” one who propagated ideas, more
than a reporter. The most important flourishing of the party press oc-
curred during the Weimar Republic, when about a third of the press was
linked to political parties – the rest being accounted for by the com-
mercial Generalanzeiger press and the relatively apolitical local papers –
theHeimatzeitungen.Catholic-connectedpoliticalpartieshadmorethan
400 papers, the Social Democrats around 200, and the Communists
around 50 (Humphreys 1994, 1996). This was a period of considerable
innovation in the forms of political journalism – for example with the
development of illustrated periodicals such as the Arbeiter-Illustrierte
Zeitung (Hardt 1996). It was also in this context that Weber (1946: 99)
described a journalist as a “type of professional politician.” The sharp
political polarization of the Weimar period and its aftermath also saw
the creation of the highly politicized commercial media empire of Alfred
Hugenberg,asupporteroftheNazisandaleadingmemberoftheextreme
right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP), who created
Europe’s first multimedia conglomerate, involving mass-circulation
newspapers, a news agency, an advertising agency, and cinema pro-
duction. Hugenberg’s papers dominated both the party press and the
traditional quality commercial papers during this period, and clearly
served both political and commercial ends. The instrumentalization of
the German press by the industrialist Hugenberg is clearly similar in
important ways to the pattern of the Polarized Pluralist Model – the
Weimar republic is considered one of the classic examples of polarized
pluralism – though with the difference that these were commercially suc-
cessful papers with far higher levels of circulation than could be found
anywhere in the Mediterranean region. With the Nazi seizure of power,
control of the press as an instrument of political propaganda was of
course instituted in a particularly pure form and included the seizure of
Hugenberg’s own empire.
The extreme form of polarized pluralism that prevailed in Germany
during the Weimar period would not recur after World War II. But in
certainwaysthepartisancharacteroftheGerman presswasthenreestab-
lished. The allies’ policy toward the reconstruction of the German press

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