Page 45 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV/KAF/KAA P2: kaf
0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 20, 2004 15:9

Comparing Media Systems

politically partisan, and noncommercial media – even those supported
by political parties – can adopt norms of political balance. Neverthe-
less, important differences have persisted among media systems in the
strength of connections between the media and political actors and in
the balance between the advocacy and neutral/informational traditions
of political journalism.
One of the most obvious differences among media systems lies in the
fact that media in some countries have distinct political orientations,
while media in other countries do not. Ask anyone who follows politics
closely to give you a road map of the press, and, in many European coun-
tries, they are likely to move on fairly quickly to identifying newspapers
by their political orientations – in Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine
is right of center, the S¨uddeutsche Zeitung left of center; Die Welt fur-
ther still to the right and the Frankfurter Rundschau further to the left.
Even though the true party press has almost disappeared, and even if
the political tendencies of European newspapers are fuzzier today than
they were a generation ago, distinct political tendencies persist, more
in some countries than in others – and not only in newspapers, but in
many cases in electronic media as well. In the United States, no one could
coherently map the politics of the media in this way; those on the left of
the spectrum are likely to tell you that all the media slant to the right,
and those on the right that they slant to the left.
This distinction is expressed by the concept of party-press parallelism,
proposed in some of the earliest work on comparative analysis of media
systems (Seymour-Ure 1974; Blumler and Gurevitch 1975), and which
we will adapt by referring to the broader concept of political parallelism.
WhatSeymour-Ureandotherearlycomparativeanalystsmeantbyparty-
press parallelism was the degree to which the structure of the media sys-
temparalleledthatofthepartysystem.Itexistsinitsstrongestformwhen
each news organization is aligned with a particular party, whose views it
represents in the public sphere, as, for example in Denmark in the early
twentieth century, when each town had four newspapers, representing
the four major political parties. This kind of one-to-one connection be-
tween media and political parties is increasingly uncommon today, and
where media are still differentiated politically, they more often are asso-
ciated not with particular parties, but with general political tendencies:
the Frankfurter Allgemeine is a paper of the right-center, not narrowly
of the Christian Democratic party; the S¨uddeutsche Zeitung of the left-
center, not narrowly of the Social Democrats, etc. In the Netherlands,
Van der Eijk (2000: 320) describes Die Volkskrant as “oriented toward

27