Page 295 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV
0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 21, 2004 16:18

The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

THE CONSEQUENCES OF COMMERCIALIZATION
A broad range of consequences flow from the commercialization of me-
dia. Commercialization, in the first place, is clearly shifting European
media systems away from the world of politics and toward the world of
commerce. This changes the social function of journalism, as the jour-
nalist’s main objective is no longer to disseminate ideas and create social
consensus around them, but to produce entertainment and information
that can be sold to individual consumers. And it clearly contributes to
homogenization, undercutting the plurality of media systems rooted in
particular political and cultural systems of individual nation states that
characterized Europe through most of the twentieth century, and en-
couraging its replacement by a common global set of media practices.
Public broadcasting systems, especially, always placed strong emphasis
on the goal of giving voice to the social groups and cultural patterns that
defined national identity, “sustaining and renewing the society’s char-
acteristic cultural capital and cement” (Blumler 1992: 11; Avery 1993;
Tracey 1998). Increasingly even public broadcasting systems must follow
the logic of global cultural industries.
Commercialization of media has no doubt played some significant
role in the “secularization” of European society. As we have seen, sec-
ularization has deep roots, and was already well advanced by the time
the most dramatic change – the commercialization of broadcasting –
occurred. As the case of TROS in the Netherlands suggests, however,
commercial forces were beginning to make themselves felt in a variety
of ways before the commercial deluge of 1980s: in the shift toward com-
mercial newspapers, through import of American media content and
imitation of American practices, through advertising in some European
systems, through pirate and transborder broadcasting, and with the
breakdown of the public service monopoly in Italy at the end of the
1970s. It is certainly plausible that if Europe was becoming more of an
individualist consumer society in the 1960s the growth of television
and radio and the commercialization of the press contributed to that
trend; and it seems certain that they have intensified the process since
the 1980s.
Commercialization also has important implications for the process of
political communication. Commercial media create powerful new tech-
niques of representation and of audience creation, which parties and
politicians must adopt in order to prevail in the new communication
environment. Two of the most important of these techniques – closely

277