Page 307 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

professionalization and differentiation, though he also mentions highly
partisan bourgeois papers in nineteenth-century Germany. He does not
address the role of the market in detail, nor that of private media owners.
He makes only one comment about media economics, in discussing U.S.
mediahistory:“Thistransitionincontent[awayfrompartisanship]coin-
cidedwiththebirthofjournalisticprofessionalizationandtheemergence
of newspapers as big business. By the turn of the twentieth century, the
notion of the news media as a ‘public institution’ was, then, beginning
to be institutionalized (31).” Clearly this implies that commercializa-
tion contributed to or at least was in harmony with differentiation and
professionalization.
In important ways this is correct: the development of strong me-
dia markets frees media institutions from the kind of dependence on
patrons that leads to the pattern of instrumentalization we identified
particularly in the history of Polarized Pluralist systems, and size of me-
dia organizations is likely connected with the growth of a journalism as
a distinct occupational category. Competition for readers and for ad-
vertisers, meanwhile, often encourages media to seek audiences across
subcultural boundaries, as well as leading to a process of concentra-
tion that disrupts older patterns of association between media and social
groups, and enhances the power and independence of the large surviving
media organizations. Of course, professionalization and differentiation
did also occur within other institutional structures, as we have seen in
preceding chapters: it occurred strongly in public broadcasting systems
in both the Democratic Corporatist and the Liberal countries, and oc-
curred to a substantial degree in party and trade union–linked papers
in the Democratic Corporatist countries, in a later stage of their de-
velopment. Commercialization is not necessary to the development of
autonomous institutions or professions; obviously the professionaliza-
tion and autonomy of the judiciary or administrative corps does not
depend on their commercialization.
Professionalization in the news media, moreover, though it has devel-
oped in a commercial context in many cases, has by no means developed
in total harmony with commercialization. It involves a form of differ-
entiation that often takes place within news organizations themselves,
as journalists assert the integrity of journalistic criteria against purely
commercial ones, and their own autonomy against the intervention of
owners, marketers, and advertising sales staff. We have seen this form
of differentiation in the “separation of church and state” that was in-
stitutionalized in U.S. newspapers in the mid–twentiethcentury,inthe

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