Page 321 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Conclusion

many complex cases. We hope other scholars will follow up on many
of the ideas proposed here. We also fully expect that when they do
not all of what we have argued will prove to be correct or sufficiently
developed.
We do have a number of suggestions about specific kinds of com-
parative research that seem to us to be potentially fruitful. There is a
need, for one thing, for comparative data on media content that would
show differences or similarities in news selection criteria, conventions
of presentation, and the representation of different social groups and
interests (we use the example here of news coverage but comparative
analysis of other forms of media content would also be quite useful, e.g.,
looking at representation of different social groups or issues in enter-
tainment television). Comparative content data is rare, partly because of
language barriers, and much of what there is is descriptive and concep-
tually thin, often focused on coverage of some particular event, and not
addressed to theoretical issues connected to differences between media
systems. Comparative analysis of media content, moreover, need not be
only quantitative in character. Very often qualitative, interpretive analy-
ses carried out in a systematic way can be of great value, for example to
show differences in characteristic genres of news presentation.
There is also a shortage of “ethnographic” studies of the media, both
on single countries and, certainly, genuinely comparative ethnographic
studies. Here we are thinking of studies, based on field observation and
extensive interviewing, of the operation of media organizations and/or
1
their interactions with other social actors and institutions. In the study
of the news media survey research has often been used to ask journalists
in a number of countries comparable questions about their role concep-
tions, values, and so on. There are plenty of challenges in carrying out
such surveys, but this is easier than many other kinds of research to stan-
dardize and replicate in many countries. It is also useful up to a point;
but our research suggests that the differences in how journalists actually
do their work are larger than the differences in their survey responses,
which are heavily shaped by cross-national normative expectations and
aspirations.(Ofcourse,theinfluenceofthesecross-nationalexpectations
couldbestudiedthroughthiskindofethnographicresearch.Wefoundin
looking at the literature on “Americanization” that there was relatively
little work done tracing how this process happens concretely – what

1
Examples include Tuchman (1978), Gans (1979), Gitlin (1980), Padioleau (1985),
Schlesinger (1987), Semetko et al. (1991), Pedelty (1995), and Esser (1998).

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