Page 214 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

of liberal traditions of press freedom and a tradition of strong state
intervention in the media, which are seen as a social institution and not
as purely private enterprises.
Theearlydevelopmentofthemarket,acultureofentrepreneurialcap-
italism, and liberal political institutions, together with the push toward
literacy that followed from the Protestant Reformation combined to pro-
duceanearlyandstrongdevelopmentofnewspapermarketsinNorthern
and Central Europe, and these countries retain extremely high rates of
newspaper readership and strong commercial newspaper industries.
Simultaneously, religious confrontations, together with ethnic-linguistic
and political clashes encouraged the use of the press as an instrument for
diffusing ideas and organizing civil society. A strong political press tied
to interests and perspectives of distinct social groups thus came to coexist
with the commercial press. The system of democratic corporatism that
developed in these countries in the early twentieth century institutional-
izedthecrucialrolethatorganizedsocialgroups(parties,unions,interest
groups, and cultural and religious groups) play in these systems, and the
centrality of the process of bargaining and power sharing among them.
A strong form of political parallelism developed in this context, in which
the mass media served as instruments of public discussion, representing
the different social, political, and economic interests that through them
debate important issues, struggle for consent, and build the symbolic
ground that makes agreement possible. Despite the process of homog-
enization that has led to a shift in the balance between the commercial
and political press and the diffusion of the model of “neutral” profes-
sionalism, a significant degree of political parallelism still characterizes
the Democratic Corporatist countries.
As Katzenstein points out, democratic corporatism is characterized
simultaneously by the presence of a wide range of parties and orga-
nized groups with distinct interests and ideologies rooted in historic
divisions of society and by widely shared agreement on the rules of the
game by which these groups share power, resolve their differences, and
come to collective decisions about the “common good.” The media are
characterized historically by a similar duality, which we have referred
to as the coexistence of political parallelism and professionalism: they
have traditionally reflected the divisions and diversity of society, yet have
functioned as members of a profession with strong institutional coher-
ence, consensus on its own rules of conduct, and substantial autonomy
from other social institutions. The experience of the Democratic Corpo-
ratistcountries,webelieve,supportstheargumentwemadeinChapter2,

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