Page 223 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

press was able to flourish (Curran 1978; Chalaby 1998). The connections
between newspapers and associations so central in Tocqueville’s analy-
sis, however, and so central in the other media system models we have
explored, largely disappeared once commercial mass-circulation papers
began to expand.
The Liberal countries thus do not have the diversity of different kinds
of newspapers that characterizes the Democratic Corporatist system –
all but the commercial press became marginal by the twentieth century.
They never did have party papers of the sort that developed in continen-
tal Europe in the late nineteenth century – papers directly connected to
political party organizations – the main exception being the Commu-
nist Daily Worker (later Morning Star) in Britain that had a circulation of
115,000 in 1950. Ireland is a bit of a different story, as we shall see in more
detail. It is, of course, a newer political system and party papers have
continued through the late twentieth century. They have been mainly
marginal, though the magazine of Sinn Fein, An Phoblacht/Republican
News, has had important influence (Horgan 2001: 148). Party papers
also existed in Qu´ ebec, the last dying in 1962 (Gagnon 1981: 27). Nei-
ther have religious papers played a very significant role, though a few
3
have existed, for example in Ireland. Britain did have a significant labor
press, despite the death of the radical unstamped papers. Its most impor-
tant representative in the twentieth century, the Daily Herald, was owned
by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) from 1922 to 1929, and the TUC
retained editorial control until 1961, when the paper was absorbed by
the Mirror group (later to be sold to Murdoch and transformed into The
Sun). The demise of the labor press despite high circulations – which was
due in large part to the fact that advertisers not only disliked its politics
but had little interest in its overwhelmingly working-class readership –
is a key point in the argument of the revisionist school in British media
studies against the idea that commercialization produces a free fourth
estate unaffected by power. In the United States and Canada, the com-
mercial press developed before the labor movement had emerged in a
significant way and labor papers remained very marginal. The largest
in the United States was the weekly Appeal to Reason, which reached a

3 In the United States there is The Christian Science Monitor and the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns many media outlets in the state of Utah. The
Washington Times is also bankrolled by the Unification Church. Religious broadcasting
goes back to the early days of radio, but expanded considerably with the growth of
cable television in the 1970s (Hoover 1988), and can be seen as the beginning of a shift
toward greater external pluralism in electronic media.

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