Page 240 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

Post, and had strongly hostile relations with Liberal Prime Minister
Jean Chretien. Black, who also owns the Daily Telegraph in Britain, re-
nounced his Canadian citizenship and sold his Canadian papers in 2001
to Canada’s dominant media conglomerate, Can West, whose owners
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support the Liberal party. There has been some controversy since the
sale over Can West’s imposition of a policy that requires all its local
newspapers to follow particular positions on the editorial page. Can
West has said that this does not affect news coverage, though some jour-
nalists have claimed Can West is undermining professional autonomy
(Brown 2002).
As the partisanship of the British press and the prevalence of interven-
tionist owners suggest, professionalization may be less fully developed,
or at least less consistently so, in the British than the North American
press (broadcast journalism is a different story, as we shall see in the
following text). In Britain as in all the Liberal countries journalism is
strongly professionalized in the sense that journalists have their own set
of criteria for the selection and presentation of news. This is closely re-
lated to the strong development of the press as an industry in Britain, and
in this way Britain is very different from, say, Italy, where the standards
of journalistic practice are less separated from those of politics. With the
development of the press as an industry, as Chalaby (1998: 107) puts it,
“journalists began to report politics according to their own needs and
interests, covering the topic from their own perspective and professional
values.” On the other hand, specialized professional education devel-
oped later in Britain than in North America (Henningham and Delano
1998) and until the 1980s relatively few British journalists had college de-
grees. Journalism in this sense remained a white collar, semiprofessional
occupation relatively late (Tunstall 1971: 59–60). Surveys have also sug-
gested that British journalists are less fussy about information-gathering
methods than their counterparts in the United States (Henningham and
Delano 1998). This is presumably related to the highly competitive na-
ture of the British press, and it could be said that in this sense ethical
self-regulationandthenotionofjournalismasapublicserviceareweaker
in the British press.
As far as journalistic autonomy is concerned, the picture is mixed.
As we shall see later in this chapter, broadcast journalists in Britain are
probably more autonomous than their counterparts in the commercial

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It was also Conrad Black whose purchase of the Jerusalem Post and imposition on that
paper of a more conservative line provoked the resignation of editor Erwin Frenkel,
whose comments on journalistic autonomy are quoted in Chapter 2.

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