Page 317 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Conclusion

Table 9.1 Pattern of Variation in Four Media System Dimensions

Polarized Democratic
Pluralist Corporatist Liberal
Development of Mass Press Low High High
Political Parallelism High High Low
Professionalization Low High High
State Intervention High High Low

negative terms, as elevating “special interests” over the “common good.”
The latter tends to be emphasized over ideological loyalty or consistency.
The role of the state tends to be seen in negative terms and the free flow
of information is understood as requiring the limitation of state involve-
ment. An emphasis on consumption of public information as essential to
citizenship is modified by the individualism and antipolitical elements
of the culture, which tend to privilege private over public life. The role
of the media tends to be seen less in terms of representation of social
groups and ideological diversity than in terms of providing information
to citizen-consumers and in terms of the notion of the press as a “watch-
dog” of government. A common professional culture of journalism is
relatively strongly developed, though not formally institutionalized as in
the Democratic Corporatist Model. Strong emphasis is placed on lim-
iting government intervention in the media sphere. The media tend to
target a wide mass audience and also to emphasize public affairs less than
in the other models.
One issue we raised in introducing our four principal dimensions
for comparing media systems was the question of whether these were
independent of one another. We have argued that they should be treated
as independent, though it is impossible to demonstrate through this
study that they are: we have four variables, and in some sense only three
empirical cases, given the interrelations among the countries we have
assigned to our three models. Nevertheless it may be useful to look at a
simplifiedrepresentationofthepatternsofvariationonthesedimensions
that we found in our three models, which appears in Table 9.1. The table
obviously oversimplifies our argument in many ways, and we hope that
readers will not substitute it for the more complex analysis we have
presented in the preceding pages. It reduces our four dimensions to
quantitative terms, when we have argued that they involve qualitative
differences as well – the state plays a large role in both the Polarzed

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