Page 174 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

wastwofold.OnonehandtheUnitedStates–inparttopromotethemar-
ketpositionofitsownwireservicesandmediaindustries–triedtoexport
the U.S. model of a neutral commercial press (Blanchard 1986). On the
other hand, in an effort to promote “denazification,” the allies initially
licensed newspapers linked to individuals or organizations that took a
clear position against the ideology of the defeated Nazi regime. The first
papertobelicensedintheAmericanzonewastheFrankfurterRundschau,
founded by a group of three Communists, three Social Democrats, and
a left-wing Catholic (Sandford 1976; Humphreys 1994). The Frankfurter
Rundschau still exists and still tends toward the political left. The British
occupyingforces,meanwhile,wereparticularlyexplicitinsupportingthe
idea of the so-called Parteirichtungszeitungen, a plural press organized
along diverse ideological orientations.
The Austrian experience is historically similar to the German in the
sense that a strong party press developed in the period of political po-
larization early in the twentieth century and was revived to some extent
following World War II. During the occupation each of the three ma-
jor political parties was granted a third of the newsprint allocation. The
party press persisted longer in corporatist Austria – similar to the pat-
tern in Scandinavia – than in more liberal Germany, however. Some
analysts described the party press in Austria in the 1970s as the strongest
in Europe: about half of Austrian papers were then linked to parties,
including Socialist and Christian Democratic tabloids, and the Socialist
Party’s Arbeiter Zeitung, founded in 1889, was fourth in circulation. By
the end of the 1990s it survived as an independent paper with 3.7 percent
of the newspaper market, and three true party papers also survived, the
largest with a circulation of about 65,000.
Party-press parallelism or political parallelism more generally, as we
sawinChapter2,hasanumberofdimensions:Itcanbemanifestedinthe
ownership of news media; in the affiliations of journalists, owners and
managers; in readership patterns; and in media content. On each of these
dimensions it has been strong historically in the Democratic Corporatist
countries. In terms of ownership, newspapers directly linked to parties,
trade unions, churches, and other social organizations have been an im-
portant part of the media system of all the Democratic Corporatist coun-
tries. This tends to be especially true on the political left, where socialist
parties and trade unions have traditionally supported their own media –
sometimes directly and sometimes through cooperative associations of
party members – and expected “their newspapers to reflect their orga-
nizational structure” (Hadenius and Weibull 1999: 134). Conservative

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