Page 313 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

process of globalization. The most important of these internal forces,
we have argued, are “secularization”– that is, the decline of the political
faiths connected to organized social groups that once structured much of
European politics and culture, and the shift from a collectivist to a more
individualist political culture – and commercialization. Although we
have made the case that changes in European media systems are driven
by deeper processes of social change, we have also argued that media
system change has played an independent causal role, as the rise of tele-
vision, the development of “critical professionalism,” and the growth of
media markets have transformed the relations between political parties
and organized social groups and the individual citizens who once relied
upon them.
We have also noted that there are important factors that limit, and
in some ways might even reverse, the process of convergence toward
the Liberal Model. Differences among national political systems remain
substantial and are likely to prevent complete homogenization of media
systems for the foreseeable future. And changes in media markets have
created countertendencies that can be seen even in the Liberal countries,
as, for example, the multiplication of television channels reintroduces
external pluralism into the American media system.
We have, finally, posed the question of whether this process of change
intherelationbetweenmediainstitutionsandthesocialandpoliticalsys-
tem can be understood in terms of differentiation theory – which is often
implicit in the use of the term modernization. Differentiation theory fits
well in one very important way: The “secularization” of European society
involves the decline of social institutions – mass parties and religious and
class-based communities – that at one time fused many different social
functions, from political representation to the organization of leisure
time to socialization and communication; and the mass media have
emerged as specialized institutions of communication independent of
these groups. Commercialization, on the other hand, is much harder to
integrate into the perspective of differentiation theory: commercializa-
tion seems clearly to involve significant de-differentiation of the media
system in relation to the market, an erosion of the professional auton-
omy journalists gained in the later part of the twentieth century, and
also, possibly, a subordination of the media to the political interests of
business that could diminish political balance in the representation of
social interests.

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