Page 308 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

journalistic autonomy achieved in much of the French elite press in the
post–World War II period, or in the editorial statutes that can be found
in some of the Democratic Corporatist systems, as well as in systems
of journalistic self-regulation such as press councils, which are intended
to uphold professional values to a large extent against the pressures of
economic self-interest.
In the U.S. case, there is certainly strong evidence that this form of dif-
ferentiation has declined – reducing journalistic autonomy and bringing
into question the “notion of the news media as a ‘public institution,’”
which is no longer taken for granted today as it was from about the 1950s
throughthe1970s(Hallin2000).ThoughtheU.S.mediawerealwayspri-
marily commercial in character, commercial pressures have intensified
with deregulation of broadcasting and changes in ownership patterns
that have brought newspapers under the influence of Wall Street. Simi-
lar changes are clearly under way to varying degrees throughout Europe,
most dramatically in the sphere of broadcasting.
Here it is worth going back to the distinction Mazzoleni makes be-
tweenmedialogicandpoliticallogic.Asmanyhaveobserved,thechanges
in European media systems have meant that “media logic” has become
differentiated from “political logic,” and in many ways has become in-
creasingly dominant over the latter. Story selection, for example, is in-
creasingly determined not by political criteria – such as principles of
proportional representation – but by journalistic or media-based cri-
teria of what is a “good story.” It is important to recognize, however,
that this “media logic” that has emerged in the late twentieth century
is a hybrid logic: as we have seen, it is rooted in two developments that
overlapped historically, and were intertwined in important ways, but are
also distinct:

1. the growth of critical professionalism, which was particularly im-
portant in the 1960s and 1970s (and even later in some European
countries) and probably has slowed down or even been reversed to
a degree since that time; and
2. commercialization, which was beginning in the 1960s and 1970s
but accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s.

The former fits the story told by differentiation theory much better than
the latter. The growth of infotainment as a hybrid form of programming
is a good illustration. Luhmann argues that the differentiation of mass
media content into three genres – news and current affairs, advertising,

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