Page 228 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV/KAA P2: kaf
0521835356c07.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 21, 2004 16:24

The Three Models

distinct political traditions and affinities relatively late, the Irish Times,
the original penny paper, being originally Unionist in orientation and
thenshiftingtowardneutrality,theIrishIndependentsupportingtheFine
Gael party until 1979, and The Irish Press close to the Fianna Fail party,
whose leader, Eamon DeValera, founded the paper in 1931 and ran it for
much of its history. Today, however, the party affinities and ideological
orientations of the two surviving papers – the Irish Press went out of
business in the 1990s – are not greatly different (Kelly and Treutzschler
1992).
Of course, the fact that the major papers of the United States, Canada,
and Ireland are not differentiated in their political orientations does not
necessarily mean that they have none. They all have essentially the same
orientation – a centrist one (as suggested by Patterson and Donsbach’s
survey, in which all the major media were located between the Repub-
licans and Democrats), as well as one oriented toward the views of the
white middle-class readers who are the preferred target of advertisers.
An orientation toward the center and toward the political “mainstream,”
is still a political orientation. As noted in Chapter 2, the use of the term
neutral to refer to the “Anglo-American” style of journalism is not meant
to imply that it is literally “value free” or without a point of view; schol-
arship in the Liberal countries debunked this notion long ago. The point
is that these media position themselves as “catchall” media cutting across
the principal lines of division between the established political forces in
society.
The British press is a very different story. As in other countries, the
party affiliations of British newspapers have become weaker over the
postwar period, a trend we will explore further in Chapter 8. “Between
1945 and 1995,” as Seymour-Ure (1996: 214) puts it, “the press be-
came less predictable and manageable for the parties.” Newspapers be-
came less consistent in their support for one party or another, less in-
clined to follow the agenda set by party leaders, and less focused on the
rhetoric of party politics. There have been ups and downs in this trend.
Seymour-Ure argues that partisanship increased somewhat in the 1980s,
when Margaret Thatcher challenged much of the prevailing consensus
in British politics, only to fade again as the popularity of the Conserva-
tive party waned, and papers on the right began to distance themselves
from it.
Despite this general trend toward diminishing political parallelism,
however, the political orientations of British newspapers today are as
distinct as anywhere in Europe, with the possible exceptions of Italy

210