Page 226 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

In fact, there are significant differences among Liberal countries in the
extenttowhichpoliticalneutralityorpartisanshipprevails.IntheUnited
States, Canada, and Ireland, political neutrality has come to be the typi-
cal stance of newspapers. Broadcasting in all four countries is also char-
acterized by neutrality, though with some important signs of change as
channelsproliferateandthebroadcastingindustriesarederegulated.The
British press, on the other hand, is still characterized by external plural-
ism.Itisnocoincidencethattheconceptof “party-pressparallelism”was
developed in Britain, where despite their commercial character and de-
spite the importance of the fact-centered discourse stressed by Chalaby,
the press has always mirrored the divisions of party politics fairly closely.
It would make little sense to characterize American newspapers as
Europeans commonly do theirs, by assigning them distinct locations
on the political spectrum or distinct partisan sympathies. As noted in
Chapter 6, Patterson and Donsbach (1993) found that, while journalists
they surveyed in Britain, Sweden, Germany, and Italy placed the major
national newspapers across a wide political spectrum, their American
counterparts located all the major news organizations in a small range
betweentheDemocraticandRepublicanparties.Ontheireditorialpages,
to be sure, many American newspapers have relatively consistent polit-
ical orientations. But these carry over only to a limited extent to news
5
reporting. The San Diego Union-Tribune, for example, is a strongly Re-
publican paper on its editorial page. It is a relatively recent convert to
political neutrality – in the 1970s it was one of the last surviving papers
with a clear party orientation – and still has a stronger identity on the
editorial page than many American papers. Nevertheless, in the sharpest
partisan conflict in recent history – the controversy over the outcome of
the2000presidentialelection –agooddealofitscoveragewastakenfrom
The New York Times news service. The New York Times had the opposite
editorial stance on the controversy – but there is a strong assumption
in American journalism that this is irrelevant to news reporting. There
are exceptions – occasions when reporters feel (or assume) pressures
from management to follow the editorial line of the paper (there are also
occasions – much more frequently – when reporters feel pressure not
to depart from the centrist views shared by the many papers; more on
this in the following text). There are also particular papers that have less
5 Some empirical research on the U.S. media has shown correlations between editorial
stance and news coverage, for example, Nacos (1990), who found that newspapers
tended to use more sources consistent with their editorial policy. These differences are
all in all relatively subtle, however.

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