Page 224 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

peak circulation of 760,000 in 1912. Foreign language and ethnic papers
have also always been part of the United States and Canadian media
landscape, most of them hybrids in the sense that they survived on the
market, and sometimes even made money, but have seen themselves as
representatives of a particular social group more than as pure businesses.
The groups they served were often excluded by the mainstream media
in a racially stratified society, and political advocacy was often central
4
to their role. The most important black papers, the Chicago Defender
and the Pittsburgh Courier, reached circulations of 200,000–300,000 in
the first half of the twentieth century. Today the largest ethnic media are
Spanish-language media. These, however, increasingly follow the stan-
dard commercial and professional models, even if their content reflects
the distinct concerns of the Latino community (Rodriguez 1999).
Though early development of mass-circulation commercial papers is
common to all the Liberal countries, the market structure of the con-
temporary press has developed in quite different ways. Britain has a
class-stratified newspaper market, characterized by a sharp separation
between “quality” papers with mainly middle- to upper-class reader-
ships and the sensationalist tabloids, which are further differentiated
into “middle market” and “mass market” papers. In the United States
and Canada, by contrast, local newspapers with cross-class readerships
predominate; only the New York City market, where circulation is dom-
inated by the Post and the Daily News, is really comparable to the British
newspaper market. (Some other large cities in North America – Chicago
and Toronto, for example – do have tabloids, but they do not dominate
circulation as the British tabloids do.) The main reason for this probably
liesinthesimplefactthatBritainhasanationalnewspapermarket,which
can support multiple newspapers (thirteen national daily newspapers in
1998) directed toward distinct market segments. The United States and
Canada are so large that national daily newspapers were not technolog-
ically feasible until advances in telecommunication made it possible to
send large amounts of data cheaply around the country (USA Today was
foundedin1982andTheNewYorkTimesalsointroduceditsnationaledi-
tioninthe1980s;theNationalPostinCanadawasfoundedin2000).Both
arealsofederalsystems.Newspapermarketsareessentiallylocaland,asin
most of the world, the economics of advertising-supported local news-
paper markets pushes strongly toward a single monopoly newspaper

4
See, for example, Bekken (1997). Many, of course, imported journalistic cultures sim-
ilar to those of the Polarized Pluralist or Democratic Corporatist Models from their
countries of origin.

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