Page 264 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV/KAA P2: kaf
0521835356c07.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 21, 2004 16:24

The Three Models

very difficult for such a pattern to emerge. It is thus not surprising that
media owners in the United States are rarely active politicians. In Britain
it has historically been a bit more common – Robert Maxwell, owner of
the Mirror, was a member of Parliament – though much less so than in
Mediterranean countries.
Finally, as the point about administrative law and the FCC suggests,
rational-legal authority specifically underpins the professional model
of broadcast governance and regulation. Thus broadcasting profession-
als at the BBC have a similar status as civil servants; like higher civil
servants they are a self-regulating corps of professionals whose pro-
cess of promotion and evaluation is insulated from political interven-
tion and like civil servants they are restricted from outside political
activities.

CONCLUSION

The early consolidation of liberal institutions in Britain and its former
colonies, together with a cluster of social and political characteristics re-
lated to this history – early industrialization, limited government, strong
rational-legal authority, moderate and individualized pluralism and ma-
joritarianism – are connected with a distinctive pattern of media-system
characteristics. These include the strong development of a commer-
cial press and its dominance over other forms of press organization,
early development of commercial broadcasting, relatively strong pro-
fessionalization of journalism, the development of a strong tradition of
“fact-centered” reporting, and the strength of the objectivity norm. Me-
dia have been institutionally separate from political parties and other
organized social groups, for the most part, since the late nineteenth
century. And state intervention in the media sector has been limited
by comparison with the Democratic Corporatist or Polarized Pluralist
systems.
We have also seen that there are important differences among the four
countries, enough that we should be careful about throwing around the
notion of an “Anglo-American” media model too easily. The British and
to a lesser extent the Irish and Canadian systems share important char-
acteristics in common with continental European systems – particularly
those of the Democratic Corporatist countries – both in their political
institutions and cultures and in their media systems. This is manifested
most obviously in the strength of public broadcasting and in the per-
sistence of party-press parallelism in the British press. The latter also

246