Page 227 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

separation between editorial position and news coverage; and there is the
special case of The Washington Times, which was set up in the 1980s with
funding from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’sUnification Church to be
a conservative alternative to the mainstream press. Regional variations
in political culture are also reflected in differences among newspapers,
almost all of which are locally based. The San Francisco Chronicle covers
a gay pride march differently than a paper in the Bible Belt. For the most
part, however, American newspapers are not significantly differentiated
in their political orientations. The principle of neutrality is particularly
strong in American journalism today exactly where newspapers in the
nineteenth century, or those in some other countries, would display their
political colors most strongly – in election campaigns, where American
newspapers typically take great care to balance the coverage of the two
major parties, putting the story about one party on top one day, for
example, and reversing them the next.
The story is essentially similar for Canadian papers; only the National
Post is generally seen as having a clear ideological orientation, toward
the right. Most accounts of the Canadian media also make the point
that the culture of the Francophone journalism in Quebec is somewhat
different (Gagnon 1981; Saint-Jean 1998; Hazel 2001), with a greater
emphasis placed on commentary (similar to the French press) and more
of a tradition of political involvement on the part of journalists, many
of whom entered politics during the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Ren´ e
L´ evesque). This does not, however, mean that strong external pluralism
has developed in the Quebec press and according to many accounts there
has been a shift toward professional norms of neutrality more recently
(Pritchard and Savageau 1998; Saint-Jean 1998).
In Ireland the shift toward a neutral press took place later. The devel-
opment of the commercial press was slowed by Ireland’s relative poverty
and by competition from British imports. The political situation was
also distinct: Ireland was under colonial rule into the early twentieth
century and went through a revolution followed by a civil war. The
party system was only consolidated in the 1920s and 1930s. Under those
circumstances, “A newspaper is almost forced to take sides in the contro-
versies, burning topics and struggles of its day” (Brown 1991 [1937]: 53).
Or, to put it more positively, politicized newspapers had an extremely
important role to play in the political mobilizations that formed the
Irish democratic system, as they had earlier in the United States, Britain,
and Canada (Carty 1981; Curran 1996) – and indeed in all the coun-
tries covered in this study. The three major newspapers thus reflected

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