Page 265 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North Atlantic or Liberal Model

suggests that the common assumption that commercialization automat-
ically leads to the development of politically neutral media is incorrect.
There are, finally, many tensions or contradictions in the Liberal media
systems: There is a tension between the fact of private ownership and
the expectation that the media will serve the public good and a closely
related tension between the ethics of journalistic professionalism and the
pressures of commercialism. There is also a tension between the liberal
tradition of press freedom and the pressures of government control in
societies where the “national security state” is strong.
As we noted in the introduction to this volume, the Liberal Model is
commonly taken around the world as the normative ideal. In some ways
this is ironic, as the media in the Liberal countries have often and not
altogether unjustly been subject to intense criticism within them. Only
15 percent of the British public, for example, say that they trust the press,
the lowest level of trust by far in the European Union; the next lowest
country is Greece, where, in 2001, 43 percent of the public trusted the
print press. Britain was also last in the European Union in respect for
journalists (European Commission 2001: B7, B81). In many ways global
focus on the Liberal Model as an ideal is understandable. The Liberal
countries have long and strong traditions of press freedom. They also
have extremely successful cultural industries. The BBC can certainly be
said to deserve its reputation as a model public broadcasting system,
with both relatively strong political independence and a good balance of
responsivenesstopublictasteandapublicserviceorientation.Andinthe
field of journalism, the Liberal countries clearly have been leaders in
the development of a powerful form of information-based journalism.
The big American news organizations remain in some ways particularly
impressive as news-gathering institutions.
Other characteristics of the Liberal systems are clearly less attractive,
however. They are not leaders in newspaper circulation, falling lower
than most of the Democratic Corporatist countries. The British press is
characterized by partisan imbalance and a fairly high degree of instru-
mentalization and the U.S. press by a lack of diversity. Both the British
press and American television are characterized by high degrees of com-
mercialization that strain journalistic ethics and raise questions about
how well the public interest is served. And for all the attractiveness of
the First Amendment tradition, one can certainly question whether the
weakness of privacy protection, for instance, or the absence of regula-
tion of campaign communication are ideals to be followed. The Liberal
Model, as we shall see in the following chapter, is indeed the wave of the

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