Page 217 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

exception – commercial broadcasting played a larger role than in most
of continental Europe, though here there is a marked difference between
the United States, where public service broadcasting has always been
marginal, and the three other countries, where it has played a central
role in media history. All four have traditions of political insulation of
public broadcasters and regulatory authorities.

LIBERALISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COMMERCIAL
MASS-CIRCULATION PRESS
J. S. Mill once wrote that the British character was shaped by two pri-
mary influences, “commercial money-getting business and religious
Puritanism” (cited in Altick 1957: 24). These, along with the political
conflicts that led to the development of parliamentary democracy and
the opening of the public sphere, were clearly the primary forces behind
the strong early development of the press in Britain. As in the Demo-
cratic Corporatist countries, Protestantism played an important role in
the early expansion of literacy, even if religious groups were often am-
bivalent about the extension of reading from religious to secular content.
In the United States, where Protestantism was particularly strong in the
earlyyears,literacywasnearlyuniversalinthewhitepopulation,maleand
female, by early in the nineteenth century (illiteracy would remain high
amongblacksuntilwellintothetwentiethcentury).AsintheDemocratic
Corporatist countries, too, the expansion of the market and of the social
classes connected with it was central to the development of the press.
“It was the milieu of the City – the Royal Exchange, the coffee houses,
the docks, the crowded and filthy streets, the guild halls and the shops –
that spawned the London newspaper” (Clark 1994: 35). The English rev-
olution, moreover, was the first of the great revolutions that produced
the modern political world, and the development of the “fourth estate”
was part of this political transformation.
The first newsletters were circulated in England beginning in 1620,
among the growing community of merchants. Publication of home news
was forbidden, however, until 1641, when conflict between the Crown
andtheLongParliamenthaderupted.In1642theEnglishcivilwarbegan,
arising out of religious conflicts similar to those that fueled the Thirty
Years War on the continent and out of the conflict between landed inter-
estsandthemoneyedinterestscenteredintheCityofLondon,whichwere
increasingly central to the British economy. A huge volume of political
tracts and pamphlets was produced to fight the propaganda war, giving

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