Page 248 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

with $38 per capita for British public broadcasting (Twentieth Century
Fund 1993; Hoynes 1994).
The regulation of commercial broadcasting in the United States has
been described as “regulation by raised eyebrow,” in the sense that the
FCC has stayed away from issuing specific directives on broadcast pro-
gramming. Nevertheless, state regulation has shaped the commercial
broadcast sector in the United States in important ways. From the 1930s
to the 1980s broadcast licenses had to be renewed by the FCC every three
years, and this renewal process, coupled with the Fairness Doctrine and
the requirement that licenseholders serve the “public convenience and
necessity,” had many important effects. It protected the markets of the
established broadcasters; encouraged the early development of a neutral,
internally pluralist style of news with significant insulation from com-
mercial pressures; provided a mechanism for groups in civil society to
challengebroadcastingpractices –ascivil-rightsgroupsdidinimportant
cases in the 1960s (Horwitz 1997); and no doubt, for better or for worse,
inhibited the development of much potentially controversial program-
ming. By the 1990s the license renewal process had become a formality,
the Fairness Doctrine had been repealed, and the United States had
shifted considerably toward a pure market model of broadcasting. Even
today,however,theconvergenceofmediaindustriesandtheformationof
multimedia conglomerates with interests spanning telecommunication,
the traditional audiovisual industries and the new Internet industries,
has meant that the companies involved in broadcasting continue to have
a strong stake in maintaining good relations with the state, which will
continue to play a central role one way or another in establishing the
ground rules for these industries. That stake is well illustrated by the
large sums of money media industries donate to politicians and political
parties (Lewis 2000).
In Britain, a strong liberal tradition is modified both by a legacy of
conservative statism and by a strong labor movement, whose integration
into the system of power in the 1940s shifted Britain in the direction of
a kind of liberal corporatism similar in many ways to the democratic
corporatism we examined in Chapter 6 (Curran 2000). Britain, more-
over, has no written constitution, and the doctrine of parliamentary
sovereignty is central to its legal framework, so freedom of the press re-
mains an important cultural tradition but not the privileged legal princi-
ple it is in the United States The press sector remains essentially liberal in
character, with neither subsidies nor significant regulatory intervention,
though the threat of such intervention did induce the formation of the

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