Page 195 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

the actions of policy-makers and to influence both public debate on
social and political issues and the policies made by public institutions”
(Djerf-Pierre 2000: 254). The activist orientation – which was also man-
ifested in the push for “internal press freedom”– has faded since the
1970s and journalists are less likely to see themselves as mobilizers of an
active citizenry. But a critical orientation toward established institutions
remains, along with an insistence that journalists should actively set the
news agenda.
The shift to “critical professionalism” took place both in print media
and in broadcasting – at this time strictly public – and both in the
commercial and in the party press. Hadenius (1983: 300) observed of
the Swedish party press in the wake of this shift:

It used to be well-nigh unthinkable for a newspaper to expose or
criticize its own party. Today it is the general rule that one’sown
party members be subjected to the same critical journalism as that
to which an opposition party is subjected....Today’s journalists
make entirely different demands than previously. They do not take
orders from either politicians or organizations. They require that
the news columns of a newspaper not be administered according to
political principles. It is noteworthy, however, that it is still possible
to discover the political color of a newspaper in the news columns.

Hadenius goes on to explain that at party papers, like commercial ones,
journalists were hired on a professional basis and could shift from one
news organization to another: they were clearly part of a professional
culture that transcended political affiliation. In economic terms, mean-
while,partypaperscompetedwithcommercialonesandlikecommercial
papers did not want to be seen by readers as “party rags.” In Hadenius’s
discussion we can see very strongly the coexistence of political paral-
lelism and professionalization that is one of the distinctive features of
the Democratic Corporatist model and that was particularly strong in
the period Hadenius was describing. 18 The journalist is a professional
who respects rules and routines agreed upon by the profession as a

18 HøyerandLorentzen(1977:109)talkabout“ambivalencetowardspoliticians...partly
as fellow conspirators and partly as adversaries” and the “double sidedness in the
professional culture,” and cite surveys showing, for example, 74 percent of Norwegian
journalists agreeing, in the early seventies, that journalists must be independent of
parties, and 62 percent that they must be loyal to the (party) policy of their paper.

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