Page 19 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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ONE

Introduction

“In the simplest terms,” Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm wrote in
Four Theories of the Press (1956), “the question behind this book is,
why is the press as it is? Why does it apparently serve different pur-
poses and appear in widely different forms in different countries?
Why, for example, is the press of the Soviet Union so different from
our own, and the press of Argentina, so different from that of Great
Britain?”
Nearly half a century later the field of communication has made lim-
ited progress in addressing this kind of question. Though there have
been attempts, particularly since the 1970s, to push the field in the di-
rection of comparative analysis, such a research tradition remains essen-
1
tially in its infancy. We attempt in this book to propose some tentative
answers to the questions posed by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm –
though not on such a grand scale. We confine ourselves to the devel-
oped capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America. We
attempt to identify the major variations that have developed in West-
ern democracies in the structure and political role of the news me-
dia, and to explore some ideas about how to account for these varia-
tions and think about their consequences for democratic politics. We
place our primary focus on the relation between media systems and
political systems, and therefore emphasize the analysis of journalism
and the news media, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, media policy
and law.

1 Some important statements of this ambition in communication include Blumler,
McLeod, and Rosengren (1992), Blumler and Gurevitch (1995), and Curran and Park
(2000).

1