Page 297 - 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

frequency of political scandals, which can be found across both Europe
and North America. In the case of Greece:

...media have begun to fight with the politicians for control of
the political agenda and have started to make themselves heard in
the process of political communication with a constant stream of
criticism of politicians and the actions of parties. ... The rise of
commercial media may have precipitated this trend and created a
situation where, today, Greek citizens can watch an endless stream
of stories about political scandals, rivalry and self-interest. And,
as with the media in other liberal democratic countries, Greek
media have tried to create stories about political conflict by giving
particular attention to politicians who hold controversial views or
who oppose the actions of the government (Papathanassopoulos
2000: 58).
These tendencies are not produced solely by commercialization. They
are also connected with the rise of critical professionalism, which in
many countries took place before the full flowering of commercializa-
tion (Djerf-Pierre 2000). Scandals are often driven simultaneously by
the desire of journalists to build professional prestige and assert their
independence vis-` a-vis political actors, and by the desire of media or-
ganizations to compete for audience. The rise of scandal politics is also
connected with changes in the political system, including the judiciary,
which, as we saw in Chapter 5, has become more independent and as-
sertive particularly in Southern Europe. As Waisbord (2000) has pointed
out, scandals almost always require the participation of political sources
and cannot therefore be explained strictly in terms of the media system.
Nevertheless, commercialization tends to give the media both the inde-
pendent power base and the incentive to assert their own agenda, often
at the expense of politicians.
One of the more difficult questions to sort out is whether commercial-
ization has increased or decreased the flow of political information and
discussion. European media have traditionally given central attention to
politics; in the case of public broadcasting, a “sense of some responsi-
bility for the health of the political process and for the quality of public
discussion generated within it” (Blumler 1992: 36) was always a central
value, and news and public affairs programming were significantly priv-
ileged. Though it is difficult to compare levels of political knowledge
across populations, there is some evidence that Europeans know more
than Americans about world affairs, even in countries where newspaper

279