Page 320 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

system increasingly autonomous from them. Nevertheless we have ar-
gued that, consistent with the views of such theorists as Habermas and
Bourdieu, important processes of de-differentiation are also at work.
Most important here, the process of commercialization, though it may
accelerate the differentiation of the media from political institutions,
tends to subordinate them to the logic of the market and of the corporate
struggle for market share, often diminishing the autonomy of journalists
and other communication professionals. In this sense the media become
less differentiated from economic institutions as they become more dif-
ferentiated from political institutions. This shift, as we noted, also raises
important questions about power and democracy that we cannot answer
adequately here: does the shift toward the Liberal Model make the flow
of communication more open and equal, as entrenched political groups
lose their control of the media system, or less so, as media fall more
exclusively under the control of business, and as consumers’, investors’,
and advertisers’ dollars rather than citizens’ votes come to underlie the
development of media structure?
Also we hope we have illustrated here the potential of comparative
analysis as a methodological approach in communication and the need
formuchmoreextensivecomparativeresearchinthefield.Thismayseem
like a commonplace, as the ambition for comparative communication
research, as we argued in the introduction, has been around since Four
Theories of the Press. But in writing this book – if we can switch to
Italian for a moment – abbiamo sperimentato sulla nostra pelle,wehave
“experienced on our skin” the value of comparative research to address
theoretical questions about the relation between media systems and their
social and political contexts, to understand change over time in media
systems, and to deepen our understandings of particular national media
institutions. As Bendix (1963: 537) says, comparative analysis has the
capacity to “increase the ‘visibility’ of one structure by contrasting it
with another.” Analysts deeply steeped in one media system will often
miss important characteristics of their own system, characteristics that
are too familiar to stand out to them against the background. Obviously
they will be even less able to address any kind of question that involves
explaining why these particular system characteristics developed rather
than some other set of characteristics. Comparative analysis is essential
if we want to move beyond these limitations.
The analysis presented here is a very tentative, exploratory one, ham-
pered in many ways by the limits of existing research and the database it
has produced, as well as by the sheer difficulty of generalizing across so

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