Page 27 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Introduction

to suggest they would have an important pattern of relationships with
other institutions of communication.
Today this is beginning to change, due in part to a growing feeling
that the media are less “reflective” than they once were. Sometimes this
change may actually be exaggerated. Media scholars – following the tra-
dition of McLuhan – often tend to have a professional bias toward over-
stressing the independent influence of media. And scholars from other
fields sometimes do so as well, perhaps out of a sense that the media are
“overstepping their bounds” as they become more powerful relative to
other sorts of institutions. Bourdieu’srecentwork, On Television (1998),
might be an example here, as well as much speculation in comparative
politics about “videocracy.” In Chapter 8, we will address the question
of the reciprocal influences of the media and the political system, and try
to sort out some of the arguments about the relative influence of media
system change in shaping contemporary European political systems.
Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm go on:

To see the differences between press systems in full perspective,
then, one must look at the social systems in which the press func-
tions.Toseethesocialsystemsintheirtruerelationshiptothepress,
one has to look at certain basic beliefs and assumptions which the
society holds: the nature of man, the nature of society and the state,
the relation of man to the state, and the nature of knowledge and
truth. Thus, in the last analysis the difference between press systems
is one of philosophy, and this book is about the philosophical and
political rationales or theories which lie behind the different kinds
of press we have in the world today (2).

At this point, we part company with Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm.
To be sure, we too believe that political culture is important, and we
will try to show how differences in media systems are connected with
sociallysharedconceptionsaboutstateandsociety,objectivity,thepublic
interest, and the like. But the focus on “philosophies” of the press – or
as one might also call them, “ideologies” of the press – points to what
we see as a key failing of Four Theories of the Press. Siebert, Peterson, and
Schrammdidnot,infact,empiricallyanalyzetherelationbetweenmedia
systems and social systems. They looked neither at the actual functioning
of media systems nor at that of the social systems in which they operated,
butonlyatthe“rationalesortheories”bywhichthosesystemslegitimated
themselves. “In arguing that ‘in the last instance the difference between

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