Page 30 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

It is also important to note that media systems are not homogeneous.
Theyareoftencharacterizedbyacomplexcoexistenceofmediaoperating
according to different principles. “In most countries,” as McQuail (1994:
133)putsit,“themediadonotconstituteanysingle‘system,’withasingle
purpose or philosophy, but are composed of many separate, overlapping,
often inconsistent elements, with appropriate differences of normative
expectation and actual regulation.” In Britain, for example, it could be
saidthattherehistoricallyhavebeenthreedistinctculturesofjournalism,
sharing some common characteristics, to be sure, but diverging sharply
on others – the tabloid press, the quality press, and broadcasting. Our
models are in this way quite different from those of Four Theories of
the Press. They describe not a common philosophy but an interrelated
system (McQuail declines to use the term system, but its use does not
really imply homogeneity) that may involve a characteristic division of
labor or even a characteristic conflict between media principles.
Finally, the models should not be understood as describing static
systems. The media systems we are describing here have been in a process
of continual change, and were very different in 1960 than in 1990. If
Britain historically has had three journalistic cultures (others actually
can be identified if we go back further in history) they are much less
distinct today than they were twenty years ago. The models, we hope, will
be seen not as describing a set of fixed characteristics, but as identifying
some of the underlying systemic relationships that help us to understand
these changes.
We will pay considerable attention to history in this analysis. Media
institutions evolve over time; at each step of their evolution past events
and institutional patterns inherited from earlier periods influence the
direction they take. We shall see, for example, that there is a strong
correlation between literacy rates in 1890 and newspaper circulation
ratestoday,andthatwheremasscirculationnewspapersexisttheyalmost
always trace their origin to this era. North (1990) has called this “path
dependence.” Path dependence means only that the past has a powerful
influence.Itdoesnotmeanpresentorfutureinstitutionsmustessentially
resemble those of the past, or that change is absent. We shall see that
the media systems of Western Europe and North America have in fact
changed very substantially in recent years. We shall see in particular that
globalizationandcommercializationofthemediahasledtoconsiderable
convergence of media systems.
One question we cannot answer is whether the distinct mod-
els we identify here, which emerged in Western democracies in the

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