Page 279 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

It is likely that the growth of professional education in journalism
also is connected with technological change. As the written word is
increasingly displaced by multimedia forms of presentation, the bound-
aries between production and journalistic labor become blurred, and
technology comes to play an increasingly central role in journalistic
practice. In this context it matters less what a journalist has to say about
politics than whether she or he can create a compelling television narra-
tive or an appealing visual display on a computer screen. This creates a
need for specialized training of journalists, and probably tends to create
a global culture of technical expertise that is relatively separate from na-
tional political cultures. Similar processes also take place in other areas
of political communication, as, for example, the use of computers in
political campaigning similarly produces a need for standardized tech-
nical expertise. The homogenization produced by technological inno-
vation mainly involves younger professionals who are more exposed
to innovations and more likely to have received specialized training
focused on their use. This may be one reason generation gaps often exist
between older journalists whose professional concerns revolve more
around the political lines of their news organizations, and younger ones
more concerned with “strictly professional” characteristics of their jobs
(e.g., Ortega and Humanos 2000: 158).

ENDOGENOUS FORCES OF CHANGE: “MODERNIZATION,”
SECULARIZATION, AND COMMERCIALIZATION
External influences on European media systems clearly have played an
important role. As we have tried to show in the preceding chapters,
however, the media systems that evolved in Europe – quite different in
many ways from North American media systems – were deeply rooted in
particular political histories, structures, and cultures. It is not plausible
that they would have been transformed without significant changes in
politics and society. European media professionals did not immediately
or directly adopt American forms. To some extent, in fact, the ideology of
the Liberal media system spread without actually changing journalistic
or other media practices.Wehavealwaysbeenstruckbyhow commonit
is, in Southern Europe particularly, for journalists to express allegiance
to the global notion of “objectivity,” while they practice journalism in a
way that is very much at odds with U.S. or British notions of political
neutrality. Papathanassopoulos’s (2001) analysis of the transformation

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