Page 310 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

either in the market or in civil society, where they were supported by
parties and social organizations. With the growth of corporatism and
of the welfare state in the mid–twentieth century, which integrated into
the state the social groups of civil society on which much of the media
depended, it could be said that the media differentiation from the state
lessened in important ways. As Ekecrantz (1997: 400) says about Sweden,
“strong labor organizations, a regulatory framework negotiated by the
state, journalist training within state universities, heavy subsidies to the
press as well as tax redemption belong to the picture of journalism as
a public institution in Sweden.” Obviously Ekecrantz could add public
broadcasting. It was in this context, moreover, that the role of the state
as the “primary definer” of news content developed. In the Liberal coun-
tries corporatism was weaker, but the rise of the national security state
during World War II and the Cold War led to the partial integration of
the media into the growing state apparatus. In many countries, finally –
though most strongly in the Polarized Pluralist countries, where it also
continues especially strongly – media owners continued to be impor-
tant political actors, often with a share of state power, either formally or
informally. Here too, then, we should be careful about assuming that a
unilinear trend toward differentiation is the “natural” course of media
development.

DIFFERENTIATION AND POWER

It is also worth focusing, finally, on the issue Alexander raises about the
differentiation of media from social class, which brings us back to the
broadissueofpowerraisedattheendofChapter4.ForAlexander,thefact
that media in the modern, liberal system become part of “big business”
does not prevent their differentiation from social class. Much European
scholarship, on the other hand, has historically referred to the commer-
cial press as the “bourgeois” press. This is typical in the Scandinavian
literature, for example. The displacement of party papers and public
broadcasting by commercial media could thus be seen as reinforcing the
power of a particular social class over the media system as a whole. As we
have seen, the argument that commercial media reflect a class bias in the
sense that they tilt toward the political right has also been made strongly
by scholars in the Liberal countries (e.g., Murdock and Golding 1977;
Westergaard 1977; Curran 1979). Britain’s commercial press has al-
ways had a particularly strong slant toward the political right. It is also

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