Page 196 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

whole and who insists on the autonomy of journalistic practice from
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political interference. At the same time he or she maintains a political/
ideological identity, both as an individual and as part of a news orga-
nization, and in many cases aspires actively to intervene in the political
world.

THE DECLINE – AND PERSISTENCE – OF POLITICAL
PARALLELISM
The evolution Hadenius saw in the 1980s, with party papers distancing
themselvesfromthestrongpoliticalidentificationsofthepast,hasclearly
continued. Weibull and Anshelm (1991: 38), writing a decade later, saw
a much more fundamental change than Hadenius:

the press is by tradition affiliated to political parties: almost all
newspapers officially declare a partisan orientation – 4/5 with a
non socialist and 1/5 with a socialist outlook – on their editorial
page. Until the mid-1970s the partisan orientation was also visible
in the news presentation, but the latest decades have meant a break-
through for a modern professional journalism, predominantly of
the Anglo-Saxon type.

The true party press, still significant in many of the Democratic Corpo-
ratist countries in the 1970s, hardly exists at all today; and the level of
political parallelism of the whole media system has decreased quite sig-
nificantly. Depoliticization of newspapers has occurred together with a
process of more general secularization of society, which we will examine
in greater detail in Chapter 8. The traditional mass parties have declined
in their membership base and have lost much of their symbolic and rep-
resentative functions in face of the increasing role of other socialization
agencies, increased fragmentation of society and the disappearance of
structured social cleavages (Dalton 1988; Panebianco 1988). This pro-
cess of “secularization,” which was well under way in the 1960s and
1970s, was accentuated in the following decade by the “commercial del-
uge” that transformed broadcasting – and that continued to accelerate
in print media as well. This process has clearly weakened the ties be-
tween media and national political systems. There is clearly a strong

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Holtz-Bacha (2002) also notes that the strongest editorial statutes in Germany were
at papers owned by the Social Democratic party.

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