Page 213 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

26
themselvesasprofessions. KarlB¨ ucher,forexample,whohadanimpor-
tant influence on journalism education in Germany, argued that jour-
nalists were similar to civil servants in their social functions and that
systematic journalism education should for that reason be supported by
the state (Hardt 1979). Weber, who wrote extensively for the Frankfurter
Zeitung, describes journalism in “Politics as a Vocation” as part of the
world of politics. At the same time he writes that “the responsibility of
the journalist is far greater... than that of the scholar...asthe war
has shown. This is because, in the very nature of the case, irresponsible
journalistic accomplishments and their often terrible effects are remem-
bered.” Political involvement, an ethics of public service and a notion
of common standards of conduct coexist in Weber’s interpretation of
journalism.
The association between rational-legal authority and journalistic pro-
fessionalism is also connected, more specifically, with the interaction
between journalism and the administrative and legal state: the existence
of administrative and legal procedures and authorities that serve as a
common reference and framework facilitates the development of com-
mon standards of journalistic practice and an ideology of public ser-
vice in journalism. These procedures and authorities provide common
sources for journalists and common criteria of newsworthiness; and
commitment to the rules of the game they establish provides a common
normative framework and makes concrete the idea of a “public interest”
transcending particular interests. As we shall see in the following chapter,
a similar connection can be found in the Liberal countries.

CONCLUSION
The countries of Northern and Central Europe are distinguished by a
set of characteristics that we have called “the three coexistences,” which
both set them apart from the Liberal and Polarized Pluralist Models
and give them similarities to each of these. These “coexistences” include
the simultaneous development of strong mass-circulation commercial
media and of media tied to political and civil groups; the coexistence of
politicalparallelismandjournalisticprofessionalism;andthecoexistence

26 The development of professionalism in Germany followed a different path than in
Britain and the United States, in the sense that professionals worked with the state to
establish educational and regulative institutions. But it occurred early and relatively
strongly; German models of professional education were often imitated elsewhere
(McClelland 1990).

195