Page 220 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

the state of Minnesota passed a law allowing suppression of “malicious”
publications, leading to a key Supreme Court ruling (Near v. Minnesota)
affirming the application of the First Amendment to the states. But the
basic principle that the press had a right to criticize government was the
prevailing view after 1800.
The most distinctive characteristic of the media history of the North
Atlantic countries is the early and strong development of commercial
newspapers, which would dominate the press by the end of the nine-
teenth century, marginalizing other forms of media organization. The
development of the commercial press began earliest in the United States,
with the penny press of the 1830s (Schudson 1978; Schiller 1981). In
Britain, where the liberal political tradition was not yet as fully hege-
monic as it was in the United States, the “taxes on knowledge” held back
the development of commercial newspapers until their repeal in the
1850s. In Canada imitators of the American penny press began to ap-
pear in the 1830s, though most accounts place the real flourishing of the
commercial press a bit later, in the 1880s to 1890s. In Ireland, similarly,
the first penny paper appeared in 1859, and the first modern newspaper
emerged in 1905, when new ownership transformed The Irish Indepen-
dent into a financially successful paper appealing to the business com-
munity across religious and political lines. The development of the com-
mercial press was slower in Ireland, however for reasons we will explore
presently.
Though it began as early as the 1830s, the height of the commer-
cial revolution occurred roughly in the 1870s to 1890s, as a large-scale
newspaper industry developed in conjunction with the full development
of industrial capitalism, with “large-scale factory production, an urban
work force, strategic centers of investment capital, and extensive mar-
keting of standardized products” (Baldasty 1992: 52). The development
of newspapers such as Pulitzer’s World, beginning in 1883, and the Daily
Mail in 1896 produced true mass readerships reaching all classes of soci-
ety. Newspaper circulations fell from their peak in the Liberal countries
following the introduction of television, and are not as high today as
some countries of continental Europe and East Asia, but remain rel-
atively strong, as can be seen in Table 2.1. Britain is the highest of the
Liberalcountriesatabout400newspaperssoldperthousandpopulation,
comparable to many of the Democratic Corporatist countries, while the
United States, Canada, and Ireland range from 263 to 191 per thousand,
circulation rates below those of the Democratic Corporatist but above
those of the Polarized Pluralist countries.

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