Page 280 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

of Greek journalism is consistent with this observation. The deeper
penetration of liberal media practices has only occurred as structural
transformation of European media and political systems has made these
practices increasingly relevant and appropriate, and must be understood
in the context of these deeper changes. We turn now, therefore, to the
fundamental processes of internal change at work in European media
systems.
One of the most common ways to understand these deeper processes
of change is in terms of “modernization.” In the 1963 classic Communi-
cations and Political Development, Pye wrote:

in any society only a small fraction of political communication
originates from the political actors themselves, and this propor-
tion tends to decrease with modernization as increasing numbers
of participants without power join the communications process.
In a fundamental sense modernization involves the emergence of a
professional class of communicators. ... The emergence of profes-
sionalized communicators is ... related to the development of an
objective, analytical and non-partisan view of politics (78; see also
Fagen 1966).
Pye’s view is connected with structural-functionalism, which argues that
societies tend to evolve toward greater functional specialization among
social institutions, and greater differentiation of those institutions from
one another, in terms of their norms, practices, and symbolic identities.
For Parsons and other structural-functionalists, professionalization is
central to this process. The notion of differentiation clearly does cap-
ture an important part of the change in European media systems. And if
modernity involves, as Giddens (1990: 21) puts it, the “disembedding”
or “‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and
their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space,” it makes some
sense to say that media systems in Europe have become increasingly
“modernized.” At the same time, the concept of modernization as it
is commonly understood is problematic in many ways: not only does
it carry dubious normative assumptions about the universal superior-
ity of a particular model, there are also real problems with describing
change in media systems in the countries covered here in terms of a uni-
linear shift toward greater differentiation, problems that we will explore
in detail in the final sections of this chapter. We propose therefore to
start with the more neutral and specific concepts of secularization and
commercialization.

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