Page 256 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

like to explore some more specific elements of the political structure
and culture of the Liberal countries, as well as some of the less obvi-
ous connections between liberalism and the media system, including,
for example, the question of how to account for professionalization of
journalism.

Moderate Pluralism
In the case of continental Europe, we have argued that the distinc-
tion between polarized and moderate pluralism has important impli-
cations for the media. Polarized pluralism tends to be associated with
commentary-oriented journalism, higher levels of political parallelism,
and interpenetration of the political and media systems, while moder-
ate pluralism is more conducive to the development of catchall com-
mercial media and neutral professionalism. The countries of Southern
Europe tend toward polarized pluralism, while the Democratic Corpo-
ratist countries tend more in the direction of moderate pluralism, and
the Liberal countries even more so, though, as with the other groups
of countries, there are important variations among them. These differ-
ences are connected, as we noted in Chapter 4, with political history:
Polarized Pluralism tends to occur where the ancien r´egime was strong
and conflict over the introduction of liberal institutions was protracted.
Moderate pluralism is more characteristic of countries where – as in the
four covered here – liberalism triumphed early. Variations in political
polarization, we believe, are extremely important to understanding both
the differences between the Liberal countries and those of continental
Europe, and among the Liberal countries themselves, particularly in the
degree of political parallelism in the press.
It is useful here to recall the argument of Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tra-
ditioninAmerica(1955).TakingofffromTocqueville’sobservationabout
the lack of a feudal past in American history, Hartz argues that American
politics lacks the ideological divisions that characterize European pol-
itics. Liberalism never had to contend with an opposing conservative
ideology rooted in feudalism and by the time the industrial working
class came along the dominance of liberalism was strong enough that a
socialist movement could not emerge. “Socialism,” Hartz argues, “arises
not only to fight capitalism but the remnants of feudalism itself” (9); and
its ideology of class struggle does not arise directly out of the objective
reality of economic inequality, but against the background of political

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