Page 275 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

politics and journalism, which at one time represented constitutive char-
acteristics of the Democratic Corporatist and Polarized Pluralist Mod-
els, is thus clearly rejected by the global commercial newspaper indus-
try, in favor of an emerging liberal “common sense” of media freedom;
to a large extent this is the “international media culture” described by
McQuail (1994).
The role of WAN is a good illustration of Tunstall’s (1977) argument
that American influence on world media cultures resulted in part from
the key role the United States played in the “production of knowledge.”
Formal journalism education and the academic study of communica-
tion were relatively strongly developed in the United States by the end of
World War II. These institutions generated a coherent, readily exportable
bodyofdoctrinefocusingaroundtheliberalconceptionofpressfreedom
and the idea of neutral professionalism that eventually had profound
1
influence on media cultures in Europe and around the world. The in-
fluence of Four Theories of the Press on media scholarship and education
worldwide – an influence that, as we argue in Chapter 1, hindered even
the theoretical conceptualization of other media systems – is a good il-
lustration of Tunstall’s point. Barnhurst and Nerone (2001: 276) in an
analysis of the Americanization of newspaper design, similarly found
that “U.S. consultants spread their design sensibility by touting mod-
ernist form as an efficient conveyor of local journalism and advertising.
To bolster their argument, they could claim the ostensibly neutral sup-
port of legibility research and psychological principles.” (Barnhurst and
Nerone further argue that U.S. design techniques embodied a particular,
liberal ideology about the role of the newspaper as an institution of the
market more than of the political world.)
There is not a lot of systematic research, particularly of a comparative
nature, on journalism education. But it does seem likely that American
models of journalistic education have played an important role in chang-
ing cultures of journalism worldwide. There is a significant trend in the
direction of a greater role for formal training in journalism. This is sig-
nificant in itself – even apart from the content of that education – in
the sense that the development of a distinct education track for jour-
nalists almost inevitably would seem to promote the development of a
culture of journalism distinct from, among other things, party politics.

1
Drake and Nicolaidis (1992) similarly show how the transformation of international
telecommunications regimes in the 1980s resulted from the production by experts in
western countries of new ways of understanding telecommunication.

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