Page 277 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

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of the global business press, CNN, and the BBC World Service, both
radio and TV. Journalists also make heavy use of international news
agencies, including wire services and global TV agencies such as Reuters
TV and Worldwide Television News. The global sharing of news tends to
increase both with technology, as new information technology makes it
increasingly easy for journalists to access information from across the
world at the touch of a button, and with commercialization, as priority is
placed on low-cost news gathering. All of this tends to promote common
conceptions of the journalist’s role – the influence of Watergate mythol-
ogy on journalism worldwide is a perfect example – and common styles
of news presentation.
We have focused here on journalism, but similar processes have been
at work in other areas of media and communication practice. Blumler
and Gurevitch (2001: 400; see also Plasser 2000), for example, note that
in the 1996 and 1997 election campaigns “experts of the British Labour
Party and the Clinton team observed each other in action and shared
their tactical expertise....”

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
Technology can be said to be another “outside” force toward homoge-
nization. In one of the most interesting chapters of The Printing Rev-
olution in Early Modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein (1983), building
on an idea originally stressed by McLuhan, points out how the inven-
tion of the printing press produced a process of standardization, which
over the next few centuries affected many aspects of culture and soci-
ety. Writing styles and typefaces, as well as many social practices that
were addressed in the content of books (Eisenstein uses fashion as an

5 The business press is the most global sector of the media. This is not surprising because
capital is globalized in a way government or other spheres of social life covered by the
news media are not. The world business press is also clearly dominated by the style of
journalism that prevails in the liberal countries. This is in part because so many key
players are based in the liberal countries – the Financial Times, Dow Jones, Reuters,
Bloomberg. It is probably also connected with the fact that business journalism has
always been largely informational in character, going back to the earliest days of the
press.Thisistoalargeextentthefunctionofthepressformarketparticipants,toprovide
theinformationtheyneedtomakedecisions.Businesspapersdoalso,ofcourse,serveto
advance ideas – promoting neoliberalism, for example – and as a forum for debate
over political issues. But because the business community – like the countries of the
Liberal Model – is characterized by a high degree of consensus on basic ideological
assumptions, it is easy for “objective” styles of presentation to become dominant.

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