Page 298 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

readership is low (Dimock and Popkin 1997). One of the central fears
expressed by European commentators about “Americanization” of the
mediaisthatpoliticalinformationanddiscussionwouldbemarginalized
in a commercial system. Public broadcasting systems have traditionally
broadcast the news in the heart of prime time, and in an era when noth-
ing else was on television, news broadcasts had enormous audiences. In
a commercial environment this practice is clearly threatened, as mani-
fested in the decision of Britain’s regulated commercial broadcaster, ITV,
to cancel the country’s most popular news program, News at Ten and
follow the American practice of broadcasting the news in early fringe
time at 6:30 p.m.
At the same time, it is a common assumption that there has been
an explosion of information with the expansion of media. One of the
argumentsofthepoliticalscientistsquotedintheprecedingtextaboutthe
role of the media in the decline of parties is that “growing availability of
political information through the media has reduced the costs of making
informed decisions” (Flanagan and Dalton: 242). In some sense it is
surelytruethatthereismoreinformationavailable,atleastifwecompare
across the post–World War II era. Not only have television channels
proliferated, but news organizations in general are larger. Newspapers
are generally physically larger than in the past; in 1967 Il Corriere della
Sera had sixteen to twenty-eight pages, while today it has forty to fifty.
On the other hand, it seems unlikely that increasingly commercialized
media will consistently give the emphasis to public affairs that either
the politically connected newspapers of the past or public broadcasting
monopolies did. 9
The existing empirical evidence is fragmentary and not entirely con-
sistent, however, and the patterns are likely to be complex (e.g., Brants
and Siune 1998). Rooney (2000), for example, finds a decrease in public
affairs content in the Sun and Mirror in Britain from 33 and 23 percent of
news content, respectively, in 1968, to 9 percent in 1998 – consistent with
a common view in British media research that commercialization has
driven political content out of the British popular press, a development
symbolized by the demise of the trade-union supported Daily Herald
and its replacement by the sensationalist Sun. McLaughlan and Golding

9 The question of how much political information is produced, is also different from
the question of how much is consumed. Prior (2002) argues that multiplication of
television channels makes it easier for citizens to avoid political information, and
isthereforelikelytoincreaseinequalityinpoliticalknowledge,evenifmoreinformation
is available overall.

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