Page 255 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

have a strong interest in smooth relations with political authority. At
the same time – and again like their public broadcasting counterparts in
Britain, Ireland, or Canada – the legitimacy of commercial broadcasters
in the United States depends on an ethic of neutral professionalism. They
do differ in the fact that commercial pressures are much stronger. In this
sense it might be said that the level of professional autonomy is higher
at the BBC than at the American networks, where creative professionals,
including journalists – especially since the 1980s – are more subject to
control by business managers.
The institutions that regulate commercial broadcasting in the Liberal
countriesareorganizedasindependentregulatoryagencieswithsubstan-
tial political autonomy, similar to – probably not quite as strongly as –
a central bank. The commissioners of the FCC, for example, are nomi-
nated by the president and ratified by Congress. These appointments
are often relatively politicized: the party affiliations of the commis-
sioners certainly matter, and Congress does intervene when it is un-
happy with the direction of the FCC. But the agency is not subject
to presidential control and must operate according to procedures of
administrative law that strongly limit the direct influence of party
politics.

POLITICAL HISTORY, STRUCTURE, AND CULTURE
The bourgeois revolution occurred first in Britain. As we have seen, the
early development of parliamentarism and the market, coupled with the
high literacy rates associated with Protestantism, led to an early devel-
opment of the press and of press freedom. The liberal institutions of
Britain, including press freedom, were transferred in large part to Ire-
land and the North American colonies. The United States, as Tocqueville
observed, was a liberal society from the very beginning. Its social struc-
ture was relatively egalitarian in the early nineteenth century (aside, of
course, from the plantation system of the South) with large numbers
of small producers – artisans and “yeoman” farmers (the United States
never had a true peasant class) – and virtually all of them literate. The
franchise was extended to all white males in the late 1820s, and both mass
politics and mass circulation newspapers developed quickly thereafter.
We have already explored the most fundamental connections between
this social and political history and the development of the media, most
particularly the early development of press freedom and the strength of
commercial media industries. In the remainder of this section we would

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