Page 271 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

are decreasing in number – but by specialists in political marketing of-
ten drawn from the media world. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia is the purest
example of this pattern – a party originally built without members, in
which political and media professionals play a key managing role, and
that exists solely as a marketing vehicle for the individual leader; but the
tendency is general, also illustrated by Tony Blair’s New Labour, for ex-
ample,orGerhardSchr¨ oeder’sSocialDemocrats.Politics,finally,ismore
media centered, as the mass media become more independent as agenda
setters, and as the “retail” politics of rallies, activist campaigning, and,
in some countries, patronage give way, above all, to television-centered
campaigning directed at a mass audience. What is true of elections is also
generally true of the communication involved in the governing process.
These changes could be summarized by saying that European media
systems,whichinboththeDemocraticCorporatistandPolarizedPlural-
ist Models are closely connected with the political system, have become
increasingly separated from political institutions. This “differentiation”
of the media system from the political system – to use the language of
structural-functionalist theory – is one of the principal characteristics of
the Liberal Model and generally occurred in the North Atlantic countries
much earlier than in continental Europe. “Differentiation” of the media
from the political system does not mean that media lose all relation-
ship with the political world. Indeed it is commonly argued that media
have come to play an increasingly central role in the political process,
as they have become more independent of parties and other political
actors, and as the latter have lost much of their ability to shape the for-
mation of culture and opinion. Differentiation means, instead, that the
media system increasingly operates according to a distinctive logic of
its own, displacing to a significant extent the logic of party politics and
bargaining among organized social interests, to which it was once con-
nected. As Mazzoleni (1987) has put it, a distinctive “media logic” has
increasingly come to prevail over the “political logic” subordinated to
the needs of parties and political leaders, that once strongly dominated
the communication process in Europe.
There are important difficulties with the concept of differentiation
as a means of understanding change in European media systems. These
have to do, first of all, with an important ambiguity about the notion of a
distinctive “media logic,” an ambiguity about whether this is essentially
a professional or a commercial logic. And, as we shall see at the end of this
chapter, there are difficulties – endemic to the structural-functionalist
perspective from which the notion of differentiation is taken – about

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