Page 193 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS
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                                            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.


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