Page 237 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

In North America, the professionalization of journalism was closely
associated with the shift toward politically neutral monopoly newspa-
pers and the dominant form of professional practice came to be centered
around the notion of “objectivity”– that is, fundamentally, the idea that
news could and should be separated from opinion, including both the
opinions of journalists and those of owners. It also involved a shift of
organizational structure, with owners increasingly withdrawing from
day-to-day management of newspapers, turning that task over to pro-
fessional journalists. With these developments, instrumentalization of
the media declined. There were always some exceptions: there remained
media owners who continued to see their media properties as a means
of shaping public opinion and to assert control on a regular basis over
the news as well as the editorial page. In the United States, the most
important of these owners in the mid-twentieth century were Colonel
Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily
News, and Henry Luce, owner of Time-Life (McCormick died in 1955
but his designated successors carried on his policies for another couple
of decades; Luce died in 1967). Other owners certainly continued to in-
tervene at times when they felt vital interests, political or economic, were
at stake, and subtle pressures to conform to “policy” have always flowed
downward within news organizations (Breed 1955). As a general pattern,
however, instrumentalization of the press declined very substantially in
North America during the twentieth century.
The early and strong development of this form of professionaliza-
tion, centered around the principle of objectivity and connected with a
sharp decline in party-press parallelism, is clearly one of the distinctive
characteristics of North American media history and its origins deserve
some discussion here. Two principal explanations have been offered and
both are probably important. The first is economic. This argument has
been developed most systematically by Baker (1994). The shift toward
politically neutral newspapers, according to Baker, was a product of the
shift from a reader-supported to an advertising-supported press and
of the related trend toward concentration of media markets. With the
growth of department stores and brand-name marketing beginning in
the late nineteenth century, the percent of newspaper and periodical
revenues derived from advertising increased from 44.0 percent in 1879
to 70.9 percent in 1929 (15). Advertisers often expressed a clear pref-
erence for newspaper content that focused on the “bright side of life”
and avoided political controversies that could offend readers and de-
crease the effectiveness of advertisements (see also Baldasty 1992: 78).

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