Page 188 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

model, though still with a relatively high level of autonomy. In Denmark
a form of external pluralism has emerged in the fact that the head of
Danmarks Radio (DR) has generally come from the political left, while
the head of the newer TV2, a public broadcaster with advertising, has
come from the right.
Even though broadcasting in the Democratic Corporatist countries
reflects the importance of organized social and political forces in soci-
ety, it is important to note that the level of partisanship in broadcasting
has consistently been less than in the print press. Public ownership and
internal pluralism – the coexistence of representatives from different so-
cial groups within the same organization – restrain the clear expression
of the partisan points of view: the different groups check each others’
power and there is also a feeling of working for an organization that
is the common property of all of them, with a responsibility to repre-
sent all of them fairly. In most cases, moreover, there were only one or
two channels for many years, and the law required their programming
to be balanced politically and ideologically, particularly in the case of
main news broadcasts. The BBC model of a independent and “neutral”
broadcasting system was influential everywhere, even if its implementa-
tion was often substantially modified by the strong role of parties and
social groups in Northern and Central Europe. In this sense television
may have contributed to the “secularization” of society in Northern and
Central Europe (a theme we will take up in greater detail in Chapter 8)
among other things by introducing a model of nonpartisan journalism
that eventually influenced the professional culture of the news media –
to which we will next turn our attention.

PROFESSIONALIZATION
The media in the Democratic Corporatist countries have historically
had strong associations with organized political forces. It might be as-
sumed that such associations would hold back the professionalization of
journalism. In fact, however, the Democratic Corporatist countries are
characterized by an early and strong development of journalistic profes-
sionalism. As Høyer and Lorentzen (1977) explain for the Scandinavian
case, the high circulation of newspapers enabled news organizations to
accumulate substantial economic resources and therefore to offer the
journalists decent salaries that made it unnecessary for them to seek
other sources of income. Increasingly those employed in the print press
were thus full-time journalists – a very different picture from the one

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