Page 319 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Conclusion

transition involved in different countries. Media systems, no less than
the party systems to which they were in most cases closely connected,
were strongly shaped by the same social conflicts and by the institutions
and cultural patterns that emerged out of them. This does not mean
that the past entirely determines the present, or certainly that change
does not take place. But there are clear relationships between patterns of
historical evolution going back to the beginnings of modernity and the
media system patterns that prevail today.
Wehavealsoseenthatchangesineconomicandpoliticalstructure,to-
gether with the influence of technology and commercialization of media
systems, particularly since the 1980s, has produced a process of homog-
enization that is substantially eroding the variations among national
media systems that prevailed through most of the twentieth century.
This process of homogenization involves, most notably, a weakening of
the connections that historically tied the media in the Polarized Pluralist
and Democratic Corporatist systems to political parties and organized
social groups, and a shift toward the commercial structures and practices
of neutral professionalism that are characteristic of the Liberal system.
There is, in this sense, a clear tendency of convergence toward the Lib-
eral system. At the same time, we have noted that important differences
among systems do persist and have identified limits and countertenden-
cies that suggest that we should be cautious about projecting the “end of
history” in the development of media systems, in the form of a complete
triumph of the Liberal Model.
We have also explored the utility of differentiation theory as a frame-
workforunderstandingthedevelopmentofmediasystems.Theassump-
tions of differentiation theory, as we have noted, are often implicit in the
comparative study of the media, particularly in the view that the Liberal
Model, because it involves a high degree of differentiation of the media
from the political system, is the most advanced model, and that media
systems should be compared essentially as evolutionary stages toward
that model. We have argued that differentiation theory is indeed useful
in important ways for the comparative analysis of media systems. The
degree of differentiation of the media from other social and political
structures is a centrally important variable, and the changes we have
grouped under the label of homogenization can certainly be interpreted
in the light of differentiation theory: political parties and social and po-
litical groups that once took on multiple social functions, including that
of organizing much of the process of social communication, have ceded
many of these functions to other institutions, including a mass media

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