Page 176 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

an important role in both journalistic and political culture, strengthen-
ing the bonds between citizens and parties and promoting a view that
newspapers naturally have points of view that are important to their
own bonds with their target readerships. Finally, political parallelism
has been manifested in the content of the press, and is connected with
a journalistic culture in which the role of opinionated editor and com-
mentator (Donsbach and Klett 1993) has an important place.
Simultaneouslywiththeriseofpartyandgroup-affiliatednewspapers,
a strong commercial mass-circulation press was developing in North-
ern and Central Europe. This happened a bit later than in the Liberal
countries, in general, in part because of later industrialization and the
barriers segmented pluralism posed to the formation of a mass mar-
ket. In the German case, a government monopoly on advertising held
back the development of commercial newspapers until later in the nine-
teenth century (Donsbach and Klett 1993). After the abolition of the
state monopoly on advertising, however, and after newspapers began
the new practice of selling by subscription, commercial media markets
developed rapidly. As Sandford (1976) notes, the German press devel-
oped a highly complex structure, composed many sectors and layers;
the same is true in all the Democratic Corporatist countries. One was
the independent quality press, whose main representative was the
Allgemeine Zeitung of Johan Friedrich Cotta, followed later by the
Frankfurter Zeitung, established in 1856, and Berliner Tageblatt in 1871.
A second sector was composed of the party press, initiated in 1810 by the
conservatives with the Berliner Abendbl¨atterand later followed by the lib-
eral and socialist press. The third sector was the mass-circulation press,
which began around the 1870s and 1880s, and expanded at the beginning
of the early twentieth century with the coming of the Boulevardzeitun-
gen,newspaperssoldinthestreets,whoseinnovationsincludedextensive
sports coverage. Boulevardzeitungen developed both in Germany and in
Austria. Finally, a strong regional and local press developed.
In Sweden the greatest boom in the independent/commercial press
occurred in the 1920s and was followed by the introduction of after-
noon tabloids in the 1940s (Hadenius and Weibull 1999). “Tabloids,” in
the sense of “popular” mass-circulation newspapers often sold on the
street, with a much greater human interest and entertainment-oriented
content than the “quality” press, exist in most of the Democratic Cor-
poratist countries and are significant in many. In Austria, for example,
the Neue Kronenzeitung has a 40 percent share of the market. British
“red-tops” are often taken as the paradigm case of the tabloid press; but

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