Page 257 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

conflict between the bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy. There is
also a way in which socialist ideology actually draws on the conservatism
associated with the old regime: both tend to oppose the individualist
ideology of liberalism with a collectivist ideology based on a more or-
ganic view of social order.
The fact that it lacks ideological differences does not, of course, mean
that the United States lacks political conflict. The American Civil War
was the bloodiest war anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century.
American labor history is much more violent than the labor history of
manyEuropeancountries.Recenthistoryisnodifferent:forty-threepeo-
ple were killed in the Detroit riot of 1967, while four people died in the
1968 uprising in France, and two people were killed in the Portuguese
revolution of 1975. These political conflicts are rooted in underlying
conflicts of interest connected to divisions of race, class, region, etcetera.
Economic inequality is in general greater in the United States than in
European countries with strong welfare states. Social divisions have not,
however, been expressed in distinct political ideologies, or in a political
party system organized around such ideologies. The American political
partysystemisorganizedaroundtwocatchall,centristparties,bothcom-
mitted to a liberal political culture that is essentially taken for granted.
“[T]his fixed, dogmatic liberalism”– strongly hegemonic, in Gramsci’s
terms,

is the secret root from which has sprung many of the most puzzling
of American cultural phenomena. Take the unusual power of the
Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship on which
it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as it has worked in
Americawouldbeinconceivablewithoutthenationalacceptanceof
the Lockian creed, ultimately enshrined in the Constitution, since
the removal of high policy to the realm of adjudication implies a
prior recognition of the principles to be legally interpreted (Hartz
1957: 9).
The same logic would seem to apply to the institution of neutral profes-
sionalism in the mass media: the latter would be inconceivable without
a large ground of shared values and assumptions whose inclusion in
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the news is not seen as politically partial. Journalism can never simply
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Thus Gans (1979) identifiesaset of “enduring values” that American journalists
assume as a common sense that stands outside political controversy.

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