Page 238 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV/KAA P2: kaf
0521835356c07.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 21, 2004 16:24

The Three Models

Table 7.3 Percent of U.S. Cities with
Competing Daily Newspapers

1880 61.4
1910 57.1
1920 42.6
1930 20.6
1940 12.7
1954 6.0
1960 4.2
1986 1.9

Advertising, moreover, increased the incentive for newspapers to max-
imize circulation, even if many of their core readers would have pre-
ferred a newspaper with a distinct political orientation. Advertising thus
combined with the economies of scale that characterize the newspaper
industry – the fact that most costs are first-copy costs, and that large
newspapers therefore have strong cost advantages – to produce a strong
trend toward concentration of newspaper markets. Table 7.3 shows the
percent of U.S. cities with competing dailies (the U.S. newspaper mar-
ket is almost entirely local). The trend toward monopoly was particu-
larly steep around 1910–50 – exactly the period when the professional
norm of objectivity was taking root in American journalism. Baker inter-
prets the development of that norm as a means of routinizing the exclu-
sion of offensive material that might limit the expansion of newspaper
circulation.
Schudson (1978; 2001), on the other hand, stresses changes in
American political culture that took place in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, involving a decline in the importance of parti-
san politics and a growing emphasis on neutral expertise. This argument
we will take up more fully in the second half of this chapter, where we
discuss the development of rational-legal authority and the influence of
the Progressive Movement on American journalism. Here it is useful,
however, to note something about the political context of the period
when neutral professionalism was becoming dominant in the American
press. This was a period when there was considerable controversy over
the political role of the “press barons,” expressed, for example, in Upton
Sinclair’s (1919) book The Brass Check. With the political realignment
of 1932, moreover, a long period began in which the Democratic party
dominated American politics and newspaper owners were in a delicate

220