Page 311 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

supportedbythecomparativeresearchofPattersonandDonsbach(1993:
13), who observe that:

Historically, conservative parties have been overrepresented by
news organizations. The press receives an indirect subsidy from
business in the form of advertising, which has worked to the benefit
of right-wing parties in the past. The data presented in this paper
suggest that these parties are still advantaged; as perceived by jour-
nalists, there is a closer parallelism between news organizations and
conservative parties than liberal ones.
It could be added that this tendency is particularly marked if we set aside
public broadcasting and focus on the most commercially viable news
organizations. To the extent that this is correct, the commercialization of
media currently under way could be expected to strengthen ‘bourgeois”
dominance of political communication. This is one of the arguments of
Herman and McChesney (1997) and others writing within the critical
political economy tradition.
How is it that Alexander sees trade-union papers as tied to a particu-
lar social class, but commercial papers not? We might interpret this as a
sort of inversion of Georg Lukacs’s conception of the working class as the
universal class, as a claim that the bourgeoisie is the universal class whose
interests are identical to those of society as a whole. In fact, Alexander’s
claim is really about professionalization and about the development by
the media of a network of connections with a variety of parties, social
groups, and sectors of society – not organizational connections, which
tend to die out as the media become commercialized, but relations of
influence and exchange of information. Clearly it is true that commercial
papers in general have tended to distance themselves from earlier nar-
row connections to conservative parties and to broaden and blur their
political identities, as they have sought to capture readers from the party
press of the left – and in some cases have even merged with papers that
previously had other political orientations.
Whether this tendency has been strong enough to counterbalance the
decline of noncommercial papers with diverse political orientations, in
the representation of different social classes – or of different social inter-
ests more generally– is difficult to say. For much of the twentieth century,
the support parties, trade unions, churches, and the like, gave to their
ownpaperspartlycounterbalancedthesupportbusinessgaveto“conser-
vative liberal” papers through advertising. As the last Social Democratic

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