Page 322 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

kinds of changes in journalism education take place, what interactions
there are among journalists from different countries, what consultants
are brought in, and what seminars held, and so on.) What really matters
is how journalists or other media personnel function in practice – how
they make decisions, process information, negotiate constraints, coordi-
nate their activities – and this can only be studied to a very limited extent
through survey research. Detailed field research is difficult, though not
impossible to do in a comparative way. But even single case studies can
be useful to comparative analysis, if they are done with awareness of
other cases and with reference to a conceptual framework that is rooted
in comparative analysis.
There is a need for comparative historical research in communication.
We were struck, just to take one example, at how little was available –
at least in the English-language literature and in other literatures we
could read in the original – on the history of the party press, which was
important to our work given the fact that the story conventionally told
about media history focuses on the commercial press. We argued in our
discussion of the Democratic Corporatist countries that the available lit-
erature suggested that common professional standards developed across
both commercial and party papers, with the result that political paral-
lelism coexisted with a high degree of journalistic professionalism, but
there is probably much more that could be done to explore exactly how
and why this happened in these particular countries, while in others it
did not.
There is a need, finally, for more case studies of the interaction of
the media with other social actors in the coverage of particular kinds
of events or issues. Such studies could again be genuinely comparative,
or simply individual case studies designed to be comparable to similar
studies carried out in other countries. This kind of study could focus on
elections (the most common focus in existing research), on social move-
ments, on media events (which have the advantage of being a common
focus for coverage in different countries), or on particular types of issues
or events – immigration, strikes, scandals. This kind of study is particu-
larly important for exploring issues of power that, we have argued, are
very much underexplored given their significance to many of the nor-
mative questions that communication researchers often return to in the
end: This kind of study would make it possible to explore which points of
view are able to enter the public sphere, which actors and institutions are
able to shape the process of debate, and how these processes are affected
by the structural characteristics of media systems.

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