Page 288 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

based ... on giving broadcast time to groups that had something to say”
6
(225). TROS acted as a strong force toward homogenization.
The Dutch case is unique in many ways, of course. Still, it seems likely
that each of these factors had close parallels across most of Europe: the
role of television as a common ground, the development of critical jour-
nalism, and commercialization. These tendencies not only are common
to broadcasting across Europe, but are closely related to changes in the
print press, changes that to some degree reflect the impact of television
on the latter. We shall discuss in this section the first two topics: tele-
vision as a common ground and the journalist as a “critical expert,”
and take up in the following section the crucial and complex topic of
commercialization.

Television as Common Ground
Across Europe, broadcasting was organized under political authority
and often incorporated principles of proportional representation drawn
from the political world. Nevertheless, it is quite plausible that it served
as a social and political common ground and had some role in weakening
separate ideological subcultures. It was highly centralized, with one to
three channels (of television and of radio) in most of the post–World
WarIIperiod.Mostprogrammingwasaimedattheentirepublic,regard-
less of group boundaries. The production of news was generally bound
by the principles of political neutrality and internal pluralism, which
separated broadcast journalism from traditions of partisan commen-
tary common in the print press (in the Dutch case, while the pillarized
broadcastingorganizationsproducedpublicaffairsbroadcasts,news,like
sports, was produced by the umbrella organization NOS). Television en-
tertainment, meanwhile, provided a common set of cultural references,
whose impact on political culture would be very difficult to document,
but certainly might have been quite significant.
Even aside from the content of broadcast programming, the fact that
broadcast media developed as “catchall” media, capable of delivering
messages across ideological and group boundaries, may have had im-
portant political effects, as some of the accounts of the decline of party
quoted in the preceding text suggest: it made it possible for political
parties to appeal to citizens outside their established social base in a
6 Rules on the allocation of broadcast slots had also been changed in 1965 to emphasize
the number of dues-paying members each broadcast organization had, increasing the
importance of building an audience and decreasing the importance of pillar affiliation
(Van der Eijk 2000: 311).

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