Page 231 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

Table 7.1 Party-Press Parallelism in British Newspaper Readership

Party Supported by Readers

Conservative Labour Liberal Democrat
Tabloid
Sun 1997 30% 52% 12%
1992 45 36 14
Mirror 1997 14 72 11
1992 20 64 14
Daily Mail 1997 49 29 14
1992 65 15 18
Express 1997 49 29 16
1992 67 15 14
Broadsheet
The Daily Telegraph 1997 57 20 17
1992 72 11 16
The Times 1997 42 28 25
1992 64 16 19
The Guardian 1997 8 67 22
1992 15 55 24
The Independent 1997 16 47 30
1992 25 37 34

Source: Scammell and Harrop (1997: 161). Papers are listed in order of
circulation.

government as closely as possible to the report, presenting Home Secre-
tary Jack Straw as backing down because the newspaper forced him to (it
shows a picture of its own headline from the previous day –“Straw wants
to rewrite our history”). Inside the paper, near the continuation of the
storyonStraw’s comments, is another story with the headline, “More
whites become victims of racially motivated crime.” The Guardian by
contrast takes at face value Straw’s effort to distance himself from the
report and does not suggest that that effort constitutes a “retreat.” It
puts the onus for the controversy on the far left rather than the Labour
party.
The Liberal Model thus encompasses cases unusually high (Britain)
and unusually low (the United States, Canada, and Ireland) in political
parallelism in the press sector. Certainly, this suggests that the develop-
ment of commercial media markets does not automatically eliminate

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