Page 252 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

the public standing apart from partisan and sectarian interests, and this
would seem to provide the basis for a relationship just as strong – despite
a very different form – as the kind of relationship that results from com-
mon party ties between journalists and politicians in Southern Europe.
As a result of these relationships, news content is powerfully shaped by
information, agendas, and interpretive frameworks originating within
the institutions of the state. 15
It should be noted finally that the closeness of this relationship be-
tween the news media and the state has been strongly influenced by
the development of the “national security state.” Both the United States
and Britain are world powers with nuclear weapons and considerable
involvement in international conflict. Both have histories of wartime
cooperation – even interpenetration – between the media and that
state: in World War II neither the United States nor Britain had for-
mal press censorship, but in both media cooperation with the state was
extensive. This kind of cooperation has been more limited in the post–
World War II period, though it has not disappeared (in the aftermath of
the September 11 terrorist attacks, for instance, Hollywood executives
asked to meet with government officials to discuss how they could con-
tribute, as they had in World War II, to the “war effort”). The “national
securityculture”hascontributedsubstantiallytotheculturalassumption
that journalists and government officials both in some sense represent
a common public interest, and to the institutionalized relations of trust
and mutual dependence that have developed between them. At times, of
course, there have been tensions between the media and the state over
“national security” reporting – in Britain, for example, over the Suez
Crisis and later Northern Ireland; in the United States, over Vietnam or
Central America. And the state has responded with a variety of restric-
tions and pressures on the media and the flow of information; we have
already mentioned the British D-notice system as an example. Newton
and Artingstall (1994) in a comparative study of censorship in nine
western democracies, found that it was most frequent in Britain, the
United States, and France – the three nuclear powers. 16 Britain they
15 The literature on this point is vast. A few key works include Sigal (1973), Gans (1979),
Hallin (1986), Herman and Chomsky (1988), and Bennett (1990).
16 Their study is based on incidents reported in the Index on Censorship, for the period
1972–90. The other six countries, in order, are Canada, West Germany, Italy, Australia,
Denmark, and Sweden (Democratic Corporatist countries thus tend to be lowest in
the incidence of government censorship). Because incidence of censorship was not
correlated with population size, Newton and Artingstall simply ordered countries by
the raw numbers of censorship incidents.

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