Page 292 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

press (in some countries this was already under way by the 1950s, in
others, Italy and France most clearly, the party press revived after World
War II, then began to decline), an increasing dominance of “omnibus”
commercial newspapers, and, in consequence, a separation of newspa-
pers from their earlier rooting in the world of politics. To some degree,
this shift was no doubt a result of the broader process of secularization,
as readers became less committed politically and less inclined to choose a
newspaper on the basis of its political orientation. But it is also clear that
the internal development of newspaper markets pushed strongly in this
direction. Indeed market forces were beginning to put pressure on the
party press early in the twentieth century, when party allegiance was still
strongly entrenched in the political culture. The number of newspapers
in Sweden, for example, peaked in 1920 (Picard 1988: 18). From that
point on, just as in the North American case we explored in Chapter 7,
there was a trend toward concentration in newspaper markets, with the
resultthatnewspapersincreasinglyattemptedtoexpandtheirmarketsby
appealing across traditional group and ideological boundaries. Highly
capitalized, advertising-funded commercial papers tended to drive less
wealthy, politically oriented papers out of the market, eventually lead-
ing to an almost complete eclipse of the party press that dominated the
media in these countries for most of the twentieth century.
Evenmoredramaticthanthechangesintheprintpress,however,isthe
transformation of European broadcasting from an almost purely public
service system in 1970 to a system in which commercial broadcasting
is increasingly dominant. The “commercial deluge,” as it is commonly
called, began in Italy, following a 1976 decision of the Italian Supreme
Court that invalidated the legal monopoly of public broadcasting allow-
ing private stations to broadcast within local areas. (Even earlier, TROS
and Veronica, the latter originating from a pirate radio station and ori-
ented toward the youth culture, had begun operating in the Netherlands,
within the public service structure but by a very different logic.) By 1990,
most of the rest of Europe had introduced commercial broadcasting and
by the end of the century only Austria, Ireland, and Switzerland had
8
no significant commercial television. In most countries (see Table 2.4)
commercial broadcasting had a majority of the audience and compe-
tition for audience had significantly transformed public broadcasting
8 Allaresmallcountriesnexttolargecountrieswiththesamelanguage.Foreigntelevision
has a large audience in all of them – a majority of the audience in the Swiss case – and
the market has generally been considered too small, given this competition, to sustain
domestic commercial broadcasters at the national level.

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