Page 20 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

WHY COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS?
It is worth dwelling for a moment on one of the most basic insights of
Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm: the idea that if we want to address a
question such as “Why is the press as it is?” we must turn to comparative
analysis. The role of comparative analysis in social theory can be under-
stood in terms of two basic functions: its role in concept formation and
clarification and its role in causal inference. 2
Comparative analysis is valuable in social investigation, in the first
place, because it sensitizes us to variation and to similarity, and this can
contribute powerfully to concept formation and to the refinement of
our conceptual apparatus. Most of the literature on the media is highly
ethnocentric, in the sense that it refers only to the experience of a single
country, yet is written in general terms, as though the model that pre-
vailedinthatcountrywereuniversal.This,atleast,istrueinthecountries
with the most-developed media scholarship, including the United States,
Britain,France,andGermany.Incountrieswithlessdevelopedtraditions
of media research, another pattern often emerges: a tendency to borrow
the literature of other countries – usually the Anglo-American or the
French literature – and to treat that borrowed literature as though it
could be applied unproblematically anywhere. We believe this style of
research has often held media researchers back from even posing the
question, “Why are the media as they are?” Important aspects of media
systems are assumed to be “natural,” or in some cases are so familiar
that they are not perceived at all. Because it “denaturalizes” a media
system that is so familiar to us, comparison forces us to conceptualize
more clearly what aspects of that system actually require explanation.
In that sense comparative analysis, as Blumler and Gurevitch (1975: 76)
say, has the “capacity to render the invisible visible,” to draw our atten-
tion to aspects of any media system, including our own, that “may be
taken for granted and difficult to detect when the focus is on only one
national case.” Our own comparative work began with the experience
of exactly this type of insight. Comparing U.S. and Italian TV news in
the early 1980s, familiar patterns of news construction, which we had
to some extent assumed were the natural form of TV news, were re-
vealed to us as products of a particular system. We were thus forced to
notice and to try to account for many things we had passed over, for

2
Basic works on the comparative method, beyond those cited in the text, include Marsh
(1964), Przeworski and Teune (1970), Tilly (1984), Dogan and Pelassy (1990), and
Collier (1993).

2