Page 244 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

will appeal to popular sentiments. Journalists take collective pride in do-
ing this well, apart from their own political opinions. The development
of this form of professionalism is critical to understanding how it is pos-
sible that a strong majority of British journalists have historically been
on the left politically, while most of the newspapers are on the right.
The dominant form of professionalism in North America is different
in that it is tied to the notion of objectivity. But it also imposes con-
straints on journalistic autonomy. The American author of this book
spent a lot of time in the 1980s interviewing journalists covering the
conflict in Central America. American and European journalists among
the world press corps often criticized one another’s professionalism.
The Americans would say that the European journalists were “unprofes-
sional” because they were too politicized, and were always injecting their
own opinions into their reporting. The Europeans would say that the
Americans were “unprofessional” because they were so constrained by
the routines of balance and “objectivity” that they didn’t exercise inde-
pendent judgment. So, for example, they might travel to the countryside
to report from the scene of what strongly appeared to be a govern-
ment massacre of unarmed peasants, but in writing the story they would
have to balance the accounts of the local population with denials from
the army and the U.S. embassy, and write the story in a way that sug-
gested they had no opinion of their own about which account was right
(cf. Pedelty 1995). To the Europeans, they were not “honest witnesses”
in the sense expressed by Frenkel, who was quoted in our discussion of
continental European notions of professionalism in Chapter 2. Much
of the media research of Liberal societies has been devoted to showing
how professional routines can lead to subservience of the news media
not to the particular political commitments of individual owners, but
to a broader dominant view among political elites. The notion of pro-
fessional routines is worth underscoring here. Because of the relatively
strong professionalization of journalism in Liberal systems, media schol-
arship in these countries has developed a distinctive focus on this notion,
and the politics of news is normally explained primarily by the cultural
assumptions and structural limits built into these routines, rather than
in terms of the personal views or political connections of journalists,
instrumental control by owners, or political pressures from outside of
news organizations (Sigal 1973; Tuchman 1978; Gans 1979; Gitlin 1980;
Hallin 1986; Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1987; Schlesinger 1987).
Therelationofprofessionalizationtocommercialconstraintsonjour-
nalistsissimilarlyambivalent.Theearlydrivetowardprofessionalization

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