Page 193 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS
P. 193
P1: GLB/IRK/kaa P2: KAF
0521835356c06.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 28, 2004 21:0
The North/Central European Model
guidance with respect to information and the expression of opinions”). 16
GermanyhaddebatesoninnerePressefreiheit,orinternalpressfreedom –
the freedom of journalists within the news organization – in the 1970s.
There were efforts at this time to roll back the protection of the owner’s
prerogative provided by the tendenz exception and to give journalists
stronger rights of participation in decision making within media orga-
nizations. A few newspapers and the magazine Stern established edito-
rial statutes that gave journalists some such rights (the strongest sur-
viving today is at the left-wing daily Taz); but legislation to establish
such a right in law was beaten back by media owners (Humphreys
1994: 108–10; Holtz-Bacha 2002), and the movement faded after the
1970s. In the 1980s, when private broadcasting was introduced, some
of the L¨ ander required broadcasting organizations to negotiate editorial
statutes protecting journalistic autonomy, as a means of promoting plu-
ralism in media content and preventing instrumentalization of private
broadcasting.
In the Netherlands journalists were successful in the 1960s and 1970s
in winning editorial statutes (redactienstatuten) that protected their in-
dependence. In the view of van der Eijk these statutes help explain why
the “depillarization” discussed in the next section did not “leave the
field open for the establishment of an all-out commercial or tabloid
press” (316). State economic subsidies are granted in the Netherlands
and in Norway only if journalists have complete editorial autonomy
(Humphreys 1996). In Norway, the Redaktørplakaten or Editor’sCode
as well as the Norwegian Press Association Code of Ethics give the editor-
in-chief sole power to decide what to publish, excluding the publisher
from any right to control content; this right has come to be recognized
by the Norwegian courts. Interventions by owners have on occasion pro-
duced mass resignations of journalists from Norwegian papers and led
to the death of the paper Midhordaland in 1987 (Wolland 1993: 120–1).
The high level of professionalization in the Democratic Corporatist
countries means that the issue of instrumentalization of the media,
16 The phrase about “ideological guidance” comes from the European Union Directive
on the worker participation in business enterprises, which gave countries the option
of excepting “ideological enterprises.” Three of the Democratic Corporatist countries,
Germany, Austria, and Sweden, elected to exclude news media according to this pro-
vision (Holtz-Bacha 2002). As we shall see in the following text there is a tendency for
German journalists to work for newspapers whose politics are similar to their own.
It is possible that this is one reason for the low level of editorial intervention – that
political coordination is already partly achieved in the hiring process.
175