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The Three Models
which, as we saw in Chapter 5 is a strong concern in the Polarized Plural-
ist countries, is not nearly as central a focus either of media scholarship
or of public debates over the media in Northern and Central Europe.
Probably there is even less focus on this issue in the Democratic Corpo-
ratist than in the Liberal countries. The greatest exception can be found
in Germany, where Axel Springer, owner of the right-wing Bild and Welt,
was the subject of considerable controversy, particularly in the 1960s and
1970s (Humphreys 1994: 92ff). 17 In general, though, debates over the
political implications of media ownership usually are more structural
than instrumental in character: they concern the decline of diversity
with media concentration and the tendency for “bourgeois” papers of
the center and right to drive out papers of the left through commercial
competition, more than the role of individual media owners as political
actors.
The development of this level of journalistic autonomy, and at the
structural level a strong differentiation of news media as an indepen-
dent social institution, has a fairly complex historical evolution. In the
early twentieth century, even if professional ethics and solidarity were
already significantly developed, the political content of journalism was
largely controlled by owners or in the case of party papers by the party
hierarchy. “The editorial board controlled with an iron grip who among
journalists could speak about politics” (Olsson 2002: 61). By the 1950s –
in Olsson’s account of the Swedish press – the editorialist, who was the
journalistic figure most closely tied to the political world, was becoming
less important and the “socially responsible news reporter” more so. The
latter was generally deferential toward the leaders of parties and social
organizations, but did play the role of being an “active proponent of
modernization and progress.”“News journalism now [had] the right
to engage in the politics of the day – with the proviso that it remain
non-controversial (165).” By the 1960s in Sweden (Hadenius 1983;
Djerf-Pierre 2000; Olsson 2002) as in other countries (e.g., Wigbold
1979; van der Eijk 2000) the proviso that journalism remain noncon-
troversial was being challenged. A culture of critical professionalism was
emerging and journalists were asserting the right to criticize political
and social elites and to focus attention on social problems, often with
an activist orientation: “journalists . . . had the ambition to scrutinize
17
The politics of the Springer press is a prominent theme in the popular novel The Lost
Honor of Katherina Blum (B¨ oll 1975).
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