Page 270 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

the changes in European media systems as a shift toward the Liberal
Model that prevails in its purest form in North America.
Party newspapers and other media connected to organized social
groups – media whose primary purposes were to mobilize collective
action and to intervene in the public sphere and that once played a
central role in both the Democratic Corporatist and Polarized Pluralist
systems – have declined in favor of commercial papers whose purpose is
to make a profit by delivering information and entertainment to individ-
ual consumers and the attention of consumers to advertisers. In Finland,
to take one typical example from the Democratic Corporatist system,
the market share of politically aligned papers declined from 70 percent
in 1950 to a bit more than 50 percent in 1970, and less than 15 percent in
1995 (Salokangas 1999: 98). Polemical styles of writing have declined in
favor of “Anglo-Saxon” practices of separation of news and commen-
tary and emphasis on information, narrative, sensation, and entertain-
ment, rather than ideas. A model of journalistic professionalism based
on the principles of “objectivity” and political neutrality is increasingly
dominant.
In the field of broadcasting, the “commercial deluge” of the 1980s–90s
has displaced the public service monopolies of an earlier era in favor of
mixed systems in which commercial media are increasingly dominant.
Broadcasting has been transformed from a political and cultural insti-
tution in which market forces played a minimal role into an industry
in which they are central, even for the remaining public broadcasters
who must fight to maintain audience share. Styles of broadcast journal-
ism have shifted from informational forms centered around the political
party system toward the dramatized, personalized, and popularized style
pioneered in the United States (Brants 1985, 1998). Telecommunications
industries have similarly been liberalized.
Patternsofpoliticalcommunicationhavealsobeentransformed,away
from party-centered patterns rooted in the same organized social groups
astheoldnewspapersystem,towardmedia-centeredpatternsthatinvolve
marketing parties and their leaders to a mass of individual consumers.
Political parties, like newspapers, tend to blur their ideological identities
and connections to particular social groups and interests in order to ap-
peal to as broad an electorate as possible – theytendtobecome “catchall”
parties. Politics is increasingly “personalized” or “presidentialized,” as
individual party leaders become more central to a party’s image and
appeal. Politics is also “professionalized,” as parties and campaigns are
increasingly run not by rank-and-file party members and activists – who

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