Page 33 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Introduction

We suspect that in most cases comparative analysis would suggest
complex answers to these kinds of questions. That is, it would help us
specify under what circumstances commercialization leads to media inde-
pendence, under what circumstances it undercuts it, and under what cir-
cumstances other institutional arrangements might be more conducive
totherealizationofthatvalue.Andwewillinsistinaddressingnormative
questions that these questions can never be answered in a purely abstract
and universal way. It is not clear that media models that “work” in one
context would also “work” in another very different one. It is not clear
that one could have transplanted American neutral commercial journal-
ism, for instance, or British tabloid journalism to 1950s Netherlands or
1970s Italy and expect it to have had any credibility to audiences or any
relevance to democratic politics as it was actually conducted in those
contexts. Similarly, we may judge party newspapers to be of little rele-
vance to the democratic process in Western Europe at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, but this does not mean we can dismiss their
significance in the different political context in which they flourished
some decades ago – or, perhaps, deny that in some other political sys-
tem they might play an important role today. Any judgment we make
about a media system has to be based on a clear understanding of its
social context – of such elements as the divisions existing within society,
the political process by which they were (or were not) resolved, and the
prevailing patterns of political belief.

LIMITATIONS OF DATA
“Writing in 1975, nobody could claim to be able to paint an assured
portrait of the field of investigation to be discussed in this essay.” So
wrote Blumler and Gurevitch (1975 [1995]) in an early effort to de-
velop a framework for comparative analysis in political communication.
“It is not only that few political communication studies have yet been
mounted with a comparative focus. More to the point, there is [no] set-
tled view of what such studies should be concerned with . . . (59).” Things
are a little better today. A number of genuinely comparative studies have
beendone,andscholarlycommunicationacrossnationalboundarieshas
increased substantially (this is manifested, for example, in the creation
of the European Journal of Communication in 1985). Nevertheless, the
basic situation is as Blumler and Gurevitch described it in 1975: limi-
tations of comparative data impose severe restrictions on our ability to

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