Page 53 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

of medical or legal knowledge. Journalists lack esoteric knowledge,
though their strategic position in the flow of information sometimes
provides a partial substitute. Unlike doctors and lawyers who pro-
vide personal services, moreover, journalists work in an industry
where mass production is the norm. They almost never own their
own means of production, but are salaried employees of large enter-
prises. In some sense, the professionalization of journalism begins
precisely when the first hired reporters enter the picture, and the
occupation of the journalist thus begins to become differentiated
from that of printer or politician/owner. Aside from a few historical
moments and the special cases that we will explore below, journalists
have rarely asserted and almost never achieved the right to control
media organizations outright. Nevertheless, they have often been
successful in achieving significant relative autonomy within those
organizations. Or to put it in another way, control of the work pro-
cess in journalism is to a significant extent collegial, in the sense that
authority over journalists is exercised primarily by fellow journalists.
(It should be noted that the autonomy we are talking about here is
not necessarily the autonomy of individual journalists, but of the
corps of journalists taken as a whole.)
The degree of journalistic autonomy varies considerably over
time, across media systems, and often within media systems, from
one type of news organization to another (e.g., “quality” versus
“popular” press, press versus broadcasting). Thus Donsbach and
Patterson (1992), when they asked journalists in the United States,
Germany, Britain, and Italy about the importance of “pressures from
management” on “the job one does,” found that 27 percent of Italian
journalists said that such pressures were “very” or “quite” important,
while only 7 percent of German journalists answered similarly.
(2) Distinct professional norms. Professions, as Collins (1990) puts it,
“are occupations which organize themselves ‘horizontally,’ with a
certain style of life, code of ethics, and self-conscious identity and
barriers to outsiders.” An important part of this “horizontal” or-
ganization is the existence of a set of shared norms distinct to the
profession. In the case of journalism these norms can include ethical
principles such as the obligation to protect confidential sources or to
maintain a separation between advertising and editorial content, as
well as practical routines – common standards of “newsworthiness,”
for example – and criteria for judging excellence in professional
practice and allocating professional prestige. Professionalization of

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