Page 239 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

position politically. This was the first period in U.S. history in which po-
litical divisions reflected class differences primarily, at least outside the
South: the working class favored the Democrats and the business sup-
ported the Republicans. In earlier eras party divisions had been defined
more by regional differences. This was also the first period in which there
was a significant partisan imbalance in the press – whose owners were by
definition upper class and tended to support the Republican party; about
two thirds of U.S. newspapers opposed Roosevelt editorially. Newspaper
owners were thus out of step with public opinion and had a bad im-
age in popular culture. As mentioned previously, the villain of Capra’s
Mr.SmithGoestoWashingtonisanewspaperbaronwhouseshispapersto
prevent the hero from communicating with the people. There were also
tensions within news organizations, as the Newspaper Guild was being
organized, and journalists often differed politically from owners over
Roosevelt’s New Deal, the role of trade unions, and many other issues.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington not only portrays media owners as an-
tidemocratic manipulators of public opinion, but also incites journalists
to set aside the constraints of “objective” reporting and denounce cor-
rupt enemies of the people explicitly. There was, finally, some discussion
of the possibility of regulation of the press – the Hutchins Commission,
whose 1947 report articulated the idea of the press as a social trust and
called for professionalization, also suggested that if professionalization
were not successful some kind of public regulation might be necessary.
In this context, media owners had not only economic but also political
incentives to accept professionalization, which limited their ability to
use the press as an instrument of political intervention, but which also
minimized political tensions that might disrupt business and, through
the objectivity norm, provided an alternative mechanism of control over
journalists.
In Britain, as we have seen, political parallelism remained much
stronger. Instrumentalization of the press by owners did diminish dur-
ing the twentieth century, though probably not as strongly as in North
America. Rupert Murdoch, who entered the British newspaper market
in 1969, has brought a partial reversal of the shift, insisting on control
of the political content of his media and using them to intervene in pol-
itics (Shawcross 1992). (Murdoch’s role in the United States has been
more limited, as his newspaper holdings have been relatively marginal
and Fox television did not have a news operation until the late 1990s.)
In Canada, Conrad Black has similarly asserted his right to control
his papers politically (Taras 1999: 212–14), particularly The National

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