Page 233 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

divisions does not mean that it has accurately reflected them: since the
rise of the Labor Party there has been a strong partisan imbalance, with
most of the press – with only the exceptions of the Mirror, Guardian, and
Independent – clearly on the political right (Negrine 1994; Curran and
Seaton 1997). It may be that this is changing, with the shift of Labour to
the right and the shift of some right-wing papers to more “pragmatic”
orientations:itmaybe,inotherwords,thatthepartisandealignmentthat
began in the 1970s and was temporarily reversed, has resumed and will
result in the disappearance of political parallelism, though it is too early
at this point to draw such a conclusion. The dominance of right-wing
papers in Britain is one of the reasons a strong revisionist current arose
to contest the view that commercial press means a free fourth estate
expressing public sentiment.
The closeness of the press to the political system in Britain is also
manifested in more substantial and more party-centered reporting of
politics. Semetko et al. (1991) in a comparative study of election coverage
in the two countries in the late 1980s, describe British election coverage
as “more ample, more varied, more substantive, more party-oriented,
less free with unidirectional comment and more respectful” than Amer-
9
ican coverage (142). These differences they attribute in large part to
differences in political culture, which lead British journalists to take a
“sacerdotal” attitude toward election coverage, a view that an election
is inherently important and journalists have a responsibility to convey
what the parties are saying: “the more structured character of the British
party system, the clearer ideological character of these parties and the
consequent higher degree of politicization of British society as a whole,”
they argue, “might place political activity in a relatively higher position
in the public’s esteem (5).” 10 The strength of the British party system,

9 The finding that “unidirectional” comments are more common in the United States
than the British press might seem strange given the partisan character of the British
press, confirmed by their study. Semetko et al. don’t fully explain this; presumably
partisan bias is expressed in many ways that don’t show up in the count of “uni-
directional comments,” in headlines, for instance, and in the selection of news and
quotations. In the U.S. case, unidirectional comments are not generally partisan in
character but reflect the journalists’ attitude of cynicism about politics in general. The
general differences they observe between election coverage in the two countries are
probably due not only to the strong, more ideological party system but to the strength
of public broadcasting in Britain and also, as they note, the fact that professionalized
political marketing has developed more slowly there.
10
Though it might be noted that some surveys show relatively low levels of confidence
in political institutions in Britain today, compared with other European countries.
See Eurobarometer 55: 7.

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