Page 222 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

being in the least non-partisan. Put another way, independent jour-
nalism marked the rise of the editor as a full-fledged player in the
political game, instead of a politicians’ tool.

In the United States, the rise of newspaper circulations came just after
the extension of the franchise at the end of the 1920s to essentially all
white males, without regard to property. This was the period when mass
political parties developed most strongly and newspapers continued to
be intimately involved with them, though partisanship would begin to
fade late in the nineteenth century. The first generations of commercial
newspapers in all four countries had partisan identities and commit-
ments, though occasionally shifting ones, and their owners were often
deeply involved in party politics. Hearst, who sought the Democratic
nomination for president, and Lord Beaverbrook, who told the 1948
Royal Commission on the Press – not entirely honestly – that he ran
his newspapers “purely for the purpose of making propaganda” are rep-
resentative of this era. At the same time, the logic of the marketplace
clearly modified and limited the political involvement of the press and
its owners, encouraging them to play down open partisanship – more,
as we shall see, in the United States and Canada than on the other side
of the Atlantic – forcing them to respond to public sentiment and to
2
the views of advertisers and making political opinion less central to the
content of the paper than it had been in the early nineteenth century.
It is also clearly true that the commercialization of the newspaper in
the Liberal countries drove out of the media system a variety of forms
of noncommercial media. Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America
(1969: 519) that “A newspaper can survive only if it gives publicity to
feelings or principles common to a large number of men. A newspaper
therefore always represents an association whose members are its regular
readers.” He was presumably thinking here both of the party press and
of newspapers connected with a variety of other kinds of social groups.
The 1830s and 1840s, when the expansion of newspaper circulation be-
gan in the United States, was a period of reform movements (the most
important being the abolitionist movement) and many newspapers were
connectedwiththem(Nord2001).InBritain,aswehaveseen,theradical,
unstamped press, much of which was connected to working-class move-
ments, flourished while the taxes on knowledge were in effect; like the
American papers Tocqueville described, they died once the commercial

2
Baldasty (1992: 75ff) discusses the influence of advertisers on the political content of
nineteenth-century American newspapers.

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