Page 229 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

and Greece. The spectrum of political views is surely not as wide –
Britain is characterized by moderate pluralism, and its politics have a
strong orientation toward the center. Nevertheless, within the limits of
the British political spectrum, strong, distinct political orientations are
clearly manifested in news content.
Strong political orientations are especially characteristic of the tabloid
press. It is part of the style of tabloid or popular journalism in most of the
world to reject the constraints of objective reporting, and to present the
newspaper as speaking for the common citizen and “common sense,”
often mobilizing a tone of outrage. In Britain as in Germany, this most
commonly takes the form of a right-wing populist stance, emphasizing
nationalism, anticommunism, traditional views on gender and on many
social issues, and hostility to politicians. British tabloids often market
themselves by launching campaigns around causes they expect to be
popular (Harcup and O’Neill 2001). Beyond this populist stance, how-
ever, the British tabloids are also intensely partisan. In election periods,
particularly, partisanship is more often than not both prominent and
explicit, more so than the German Bild, which has a right-wing ideo-
logical orientation but does not openly campaign for a political party.
In the period immediately preceding the 1997 election campaign, for
example, The Mirror – in most years (though not 1997) the only pro-
Labour tabloid – carried the slogan “Loyal to Labour, Loyal to You” on
its banner, and on most days devoted the first six or so pages mainly
to election propaganda: “MUTINY: 59 top doctors break silence to tell
Mirror the NHS [National Health Service] will die if the Tories win this
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week”; “Tony Blair Answers Your Questions.” Even the page three girl
was mobilized in the campaign effort: each day a different “Blair Babe”
appeared to say why she was voting Labour. Five years earlier Rupert
Murdoch’s Sun had claimed credit for the Conservative victory in its
famous headline, “IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT!” (April 11, 1992).
Whether the boast was true or not, it represents a strikingly different
attitude from North American papers, which deny any influence on the
outcome of elections (British papers of course go back and forth, and
are often more coy about their political role).
Thequalitypapersaremoresubtleintheirstyle.ButtheBritishbroad-
sheets do employ a more interpretive style of writing than is typical in
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North American papers. Recent surveys showed 83 percent of British
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The Mirror, April 28, 1997.
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This, at least, is our strong impression from reading British papers. We don’t have the
kind of content analysis data we do for U.S. and French papers and do not know of
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