Page 23 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Introduction

absence of a labor press in the United States explains the development
of autonomous professionalism. We will discuss Alexander’s important
theoretical framework in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 8. As for the
particular hypothesis about the labor press, comparative analysis allows
us fairly easily to dismiss it, once we go beyond the comparison between
the United States and France. There are a number of cases in Europe
where a strong labor press and strong professional autonomy of journal-
ists both developed; indeed we argue that this pattern is typical of most
of Northern Europe. What other factors might account for journalistic
autonomy we take up later (as well as a number of questions about how
to define it).
The use of comparative analysis for causal inference belongs to a
relatively advanced stage in the process of analysis. Our own study is pri-
marily exploratory in character, using comparative analysis to serve the
first cluster of purposes previously outlined, for conceptual clarification
and theory development, much more than for the second, for hypothesis
testing and causal inference. Our purpose here is to develop a framework
for comparing media systems and a set of hypotheses about how they are
linked structurally and historically to the development of the political
system, but we do not claim to have tested those hypotheses here, in part
because of severe limitations of data underscored in the following text.
Comparative analysis, particularly of the broad synthetic sort we are
attempting here, is extremely valuable but difficult to do well, especially
when the state of the field is relatively primitive. It is risky to general-
ize across many nations, whose media systems, histories, and political
cultures we cannot know with equal depth. This is why we have un-
dertaken this project as a collaboration between an American and a
European. Some might wonder why we did not try to organize a broader
collaboration. There are, of course, many practical difficulties in such
an enterprise, but the fundamental reason is that our purpose in this
book is to produce a cogent theoretical framework – or at least to move
toward one. Multinational collaborations in our field have often tended
to fall back on the least common denominator in terms of theory, or to
leave theoretical differences unresolved. We hope that scholars will find
our general arguments interesting enough to excuse occasional errors or
lack of subtlety in dealing with particular cases. In comparative research,
much of the real collaboration is of course indirect. Our study builds
on a growing body of scholarship across Europe and North America,
and we hope that many of these scholars will eventually carry the ideas
proposed in this volume much further than we can do here.

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