Page 230 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

journalists saying that it was “very or extremely important” for a jour-
nalist to “provide analysis and interpretation of complex problems,”
while 48 percent of American journalists felt the same (Henningham
and Delano 1998: 153). A headline like “Whitehall forgot our debt of
honor” (The Independent, February 27, 1997, on a story about illnesses
of Gulf War veterans), would be much too opinionated to appear on
the lead story of a U.S. newspaper of comparable stature, in a story on
domestic politics. So would “Brown’s claim to be tough backfires” (the
same day, on a report on the reaction of financial markets to statements
by the Labour shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer).
The British quality papers also have distinct political identities. This
can be seen in the political affinities of their readers. As Table 7.1 shows,
thereadershipsofBritishnationalpapers–bothtabloidandbroadsheet–
are differentiated politically very much like those of newspapers in
the Polarized Pluralist or Democratic Corporatist countries. In 1997,
for instance, 57 percent of Daily Telegraph and 42 percent of Times
readers supported the conservatives, as compared with 16 percent of
Independent and 8 percent of Guardian readers. A good example of dif-
fering political orientation – outside election campaigns – is provided
by the release in 2000 of the Parekh Commission’sreportonracein
Britain – which provoked tremendous controversy in the press – that
focused on an argument in the report that the historic concept of Britain
8
was associated with racial exclusion. None of the major papers sup-
ported the report wholeheartedly: as we have seen, the British press
shares with other Liberal countries a strong centrist bias, and this re-
port, largely the work of academics, strayed too far from the center for
even Labour papers to support. But contrasting interpretations clearly
showed the different political orientations in the British press. Table 7.2
contrasts the first few paragraphs of the stories in the Telegraph and
Guardian, October 12, 2000. The Daily Telegraph tries to tie the Labour
comparable empirical studies. Semetko et al. (1991: 159–60) found in a comparative
study of election coverage that British papers were about twice as likely as Ameri-
can to include journalists’ contextualizing remarks, though the remarks by American
journalists were more likely to be directional – usually disparaging toward whatever
politician was involved. This is not quite a comparable measure to the one we use in
Chapter 5 in comparing French and U.S. media, however.
8 The conservative midmarket tabloid Daily Mail (October 11, 2000) printed on the
top of the paper, using the background of the British flag, this attack on the Labor
government, a summary of a comment that appeared inside the paper: “The flashy
vacuity of the Dome, the trashy icons of Cool Britannia . . . and now the idea that to
be British is racist. This is a government that knows nothing of our history and cares
about it even less.”

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