Page 197 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

Table 6.2 Political Affiliations of Danish Newspapers

1960 1970 1980 1990 1995 2000 2002
Social Democrat 14 7 7 7 1 1 0
Social Liberal 7 4 3 2 2 2 2
Independent Social Liberal 2 2 2 2 1 1 1
Conservative 16 8 4 1 1 1 1
Independent Conservative 2 1 2 2 2 0 0
Liberal 36 27 14 13 6 5 5
Independent Liberal 2 2 7 7 9 9 9
Communist/Socialist 1 2 2 1 0 0 0
Other Independent 8 9 12 16 15 14 14
Total 88 62 49 47 37 33 32

Source: Søllinge (1999: 57), and personal communication.
The group “Other Independent” covers a range of cross-party positions. Not all
changes in the table are due to newspaper closures; some stem from papers chang-
ing their political position. Three new free daily newspapers are not included in
the table, as they are not dailies in the conventional sense. All are politically
independent.

trend toward “catchall” or “omnibus” media, rooted much more in
the market than in the world of politics, for which “viewersand...
readers are no longer seen as followers of a particular social and re-
ligious sector but essentially as individual consumers” (Nieuwenhuis
1992: 207).
The decline of political parallelism in the Democratic Corporatist
countries is manifest in many ways. Table 6.2 shows figures on party
affiliation of newspapers in Denmark, as reported by Søllinge (1999).
The sharp increase in the number of “independent” papers relative to
politically affiliated ones is related to concentration of the newspaper
market: the total number of papers declined from 88 to 37 between
1960 and 1995 and many of those that remained were local monopoly
newspapers, which toned down their politics as they sought to recruit
readers from dying papers of other political persuasions. The last So-
cial Democratic paper, Aktuelt, which had lasted for 130 years and was
fundedbytheConfederationofTradeUnions,closedin2001.Salokangas
(1999) reports similar data for Finland. Hadenius and Weibull (1999)
report that while 75 percent of Swedish papers, representing 80 percent
of circulation, did still declare a political affiliation, professional norms

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