Page 201 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

such as education, multiculturalism and socioeconomic equality,
in addition to having a positive fascination with the political world
thatitshareswiththemoreconservativeandacademically-oriented
NRC-Handelsblad.
Van der Eijk notes that content analysis has shown that these orientations
are manifested in news content in a variety of ways, including the fact
that “newspapers are still more critical of parties the more the political
views of these parties, as expressed in left-right terms, are different from
their own” (329).
Distinct political orientations in the press of the Democratic Corpo-
ratist countries persist despite the fact that journalists have, to varying
degrees in different countries, accepted the principle of separation of
commentary and reporting (the same reporter may write both, but not
at the same time, in the same article, as in an Italian pastone) and adopted
more “objective” styles of writing. In this sense, the form of external plu-
ralism that exists today in the Democratic Corporatist countries is differ-
ent from what exists in the Polarized Pluralist ones, where commentary
and information are mixed much more promiscuously. Political orien-
tations are manifested more in patterns of selection and emphasis in
news reporting than in explicit commentary. Table 6.3 shows the open-
ing paragraphs of front-page stories from two of the principal Danish
newspapers, Jyllands Posten, a conservative paper, and Politiken, a liberal
one, on a government report dealing with the issue of immigration,
which, as in other parts of Europe, has become increasingly impor-
tant in Danish politics. Both articles are written in an “objective”
style: neither contain explicit commentary. But the different politics
of the papers are strongly evident in the articles, Jyllands Posten pre-
senting immigrants as an economic burden to Danish society, while
Politiken includes the views of critics of the report (which do not ap-
pear at all in the Jyllands Posten story) and focuses on the debate about
whether only migrants or also ethnic Danes should be expected to adapt
culturally.

POLITICAL HISTORY, STRUCTURE, AND CULTURE
Katzenstein (1985) argues that systems of democratic corporatism de-
veloped in Scandinavia, the low countries, and Switzerland in the 1930s
out of a series of political compromises, as these countries struggled to

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