Page 175 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

Table 6.1 Political Activity among Norwegian Journalists, 1970s

Party Commitment Editors-in- Managing
of Paper Chief Editors Journalists
Member of Municipal Socialist 40% 32% 12%
Council Bourgeois 26 6 9
Office in Political Socialist 83 82 51
Party Bourgeois 59 32 28
Member of Political Socialist 92 95 75
Party Bourgeois 74 54 46

Source: Høyer and Lorentzen (1977: 99).

and especially liberal groups did have directly owned newspapers as well,
but tended more often to rely on support from papers owned by private
entrepreneurs who mixed economic and political goals (Gustafsson and
Hadenius 1976; Picard 1988; Weibull and Anshelm 1991). “Behind each
of the nonsocialist papers founded during the 1800s,” Hadenius writes
(1983: 290), “stood people with dual objectives: to influence opinion and
to make money. In some cases, the commercial objective was clearly the
dominant one, but in most cases the political and commercial motives
were equally heavy.” Both owners and journalists typically had polit-
ical affiliations, and often were actively involved in politics. Table 6.1,
based on a survey of Norwegian journalists in the early 1970s by Høyer
and Lorentzen (1977), shows the percent of Norwegian journalists who
belonged to a political party, held party office, and held local political
office.
Newspaper readership has traditionally been divided along partisan
lines, with this tendency again particularly strong among socialists and
within religious communities in “pillarized” societies. In 1983 Weibull
found that in Sweden reading “one’s own press,” that is the press of the
party to which each reader belongs, was common among supporters of
all parties, and especially for Social Democrats, whose papers depended
7
on their readers’ support. This habit often persisted even after organi-
zational links between parties and papers had atrophied, and has played

7 Hadenius(1983)makesadistinctionbetweennewspapersthatwere“intradistributed,”
that is diffused essentially among the party’s members, as was true especially of Social
Democratic papers, and those that were “extradistributed,” that is diffused outside as
well as inside the community of a party’s members, the latter being more characteristic
of conservative papers.

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