Page 44 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

outlets, and hence for both state regulation of media and the relation of
media outlets with political actors. Language factors can also be impor-
tant, dividing media markets into separate segments (as in Switzerland
or Belgium) or increasing the importance of competition from out-
side a particular national market (as in Ireland, Canada, Austria, and
Belgium).

POLITICAL PARALLELISM
Journalism has always had many functions: it provides information for
economic actors about prices and events such as shipwrecks, wars, or
technological innovations that might affect their interests, and it pro-
vides entertainment in the form of human interest stories and the print
equivalent of gossip. From the beginning of the print era, particularly
from the time of the Reformation, political advocacy was also a central
function of print media, and by the late eighteenth to early nineteenth
century, when the newspaper began to emerge as a force in political life,
this became its principal function in every country in this study. The po-
litical journalist was a publicist who saw it as his or her role to influence
public opinion in the name of a political faction or cause, and in many
cases newspapers were established on the initiative of political parties
or other political actors, or supported by them. By the late nineteenth
century a contrasting model of political journalism was beginning to
emerge, in which the journalist was seen as a neutral arbiter of politi-
cal communication, standing apart from particular interests and causes,
providing information and analysis “uncolored” by partisanship. This
was often connected with the development of a commercial press, whose
purpose was to make money rather than to serve a political cause, and
that was financed by advertising rather than by subsidies from political
actors. It was also often connected with the development of journalistic
professionalism, which is discussed in the following text.
No serious media analyst would argue that journalism anywhere in
the world is literally neutral. A tremendous body of research has been
devoted to debunking that notion, showing that even where journalists
may be sincerely committed to a professional ideology of “objectivity,”
newsincorporatespoliticalvalues,whicharisefromarangeofinfluences,
from routines of information gathering to recruitment patterns of jour-
nalists and shared ideological assumptions of the wider society. Neither
would it be correct to draw too sharp a dichotomy between a commer-
cial press and a politicized one: as we shall see, commercial media can be

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