Page 31 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Introduction

mid-twentieth century, will eventually disappear altogether. Media sys-
tems have historically been rooted in the institutions of the nation state,
in part because of their close relationship to the political world. National
differentiationofmediasystemsisclearlydiminishing;whetherthatpro-
cess of convergence will stop at a certain point or continue until national
differentiation becomes irrelevant we cannot yet know.

DO WE NEED NORMATIVE THEORIES OF THE MEDIA?
The field of communication, and most particularly the study of jour-
nalism, has always been heavily normative in character. This is due in
part to its rooting in professional education, where it is more important
to reflect on what journalism should be than to analyze in detail what
and why it is.Thusabooksuchas The World’s Great Dailies: Profiles of
Fifty Newspapers (Merrill and Fisher 1980) obviously includes not those
newspapers most typical of journalism in their respective countries or
those with the highest circulation, but “great” newspapers, those that are
in some sense models of professional practice. Four Theories of the Press
is also clearly normative in character (its subtitle is The Authoritarian,
Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Communist Concepts of What the
Press Should Be and Do) judging world press systems in terms of their
distance from the liberal ideal of a neutral “watchdog” press free from
state interference. Much subsequent comparative analysis, especially in
the United States, was tied to modernization theory, which similarly
compared world press systems against the liberal ideal, only with under-
development rather than totalitarianism as the opposing pole. 6
The Liberal Model enshrined in normative theory, based primarily
on the American and to a somewhat lesser extent the British experience,
has become so widely diffused around the world – partly, as Blanchard
(1986) points out, as a result of campaign mounted by the U.S. govern-
ment and press in the early years of the Cold War – that other concep-
tions of journalism often are not conceptualized clearly even by their
own practitioners. Even within the United States, the normative ideal of
the neutral independent watchdog leads to blind spots in journalists’
understanding of what they do, obscuring many functions – for exam-
ple, that of celebrating consensus values (Hallin 1986: 116–18) – that fall
outside the normative model. The gap between ideal and reality is far

6
This is true, for example, of the studies summarized in Edelstein (1982). See the critical
discussion of comparative research in Hardt (1988).

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