Page 221 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

Commercialization not only expanded circulations but transformed
newspapers from small-scale enterprises, most of which lost money and
required subsidies from wealthy individuals, communities of readers,
political parties or the state, into highly capitalized and highly profitable
businesses. By the 1870s the big newspaper companies were among the
largestmanufacturingcompaniesintheUnitedStates.Thisinturntrans-
formed the political role of the press. The nature of this transformation
and its implications for democracy has been the subject of one of the
most important debates in media scholarship in the Liberal countries, a
debate posed most explicitly in Britain, though it is present in some form
1
in all four countries. The traditional interpretation, dominant in media
scholarshipformanyyearsaswellasinpublicdiscourseabouttheLiberal
media system that has been diffused around the world, is the view that
“the increasing value of newspapers as advertising mediums allow[ed]
them gradually to shake off government or party control and to become
independent voices of public sentiment” (Altick 1957: 322). This view
was challenged by a revisionist scholarship that began to develop in the
1970s, which saw the commercialization of the press as undermining
their role in democratic life, first by concentrating media power in the
hands of particular social interests – those of business, especially – and
second, by shifting the purpose of the press from the expression of polit-
ical viewpoints to the promotion of consumerism. This debate is closely
connected with the issue of differentiation discussed in Chapter 4 – with
the question of whether commercialization meant the differentiation of
the media system from politics or the colonization of the public sphere
by business.
Certainly it is correct that commercialization freed the newspaper in
the Liberal countries from dependence on subsidies from politicians and
from the state, which were standard means of financing the press prior to
the mid–nineteenth century. Commercialization did not mean that the
press lost all ties to political parties, nor that it ceased to play a political
role; instead it meant that the press, its editors, and its owners became
independent political players as time went on. Featherling (1990: 96)
writes of the Canadian case:

The 1890s saw the rise of what was called independent journalism:
that is of large, even sometimes monolithic papers that were in-
dependent of the political parties themselves without necessarily

1
In the U.S. case, for example, the revisionist view is expressed in Schiller (1981), Steele
(1990), and Baker (1994).

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