Page 55 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

professional status: because journalism lacks esoteric knowledge,
journalists’ claims to autonomy and authority are dependent to a
particularly great extent on their claim to serve the public interest.
One of the clearest manifestations of the development of an ethic
of public service is the existence of mechanisms of journalistic self-
regulation, which in some systems are formally organized, in the
form, for instance, of “press councils” (or sometimes for the elec-
tronic media “audiovisual councils”) and sometimes operate infor-
mally, and that vary considerably in strength, regardless of whether
they are formally organized.
INSTRUMENTALIZATION. We will often draw a contrast in the pages that
followbetweenprofessionalizationandinstrumentalizationofthemedia.
What we mean by instrumentalization is control of the media by outside
actors–parties,politicians,socialgroupsormovements,oreconomicac-
tors seeking political influence – who use them to intervene in the world
of politics. A political party paper is in some sense an instrument for the
party’s intervention in the political world, though as we shall see many
party-linked papers eventually drifted away from a purely instrumental
conception of their social function. We shall also see that privately owned
papers have been established primarily or partly to serve as vehicles for
political intervention. Obviously, to the extent that media organizations
are instrumentalized in this way, professionalization as previously de-
fined will be low: journalists will lack autonomy, political rather than
distinctively journalistic criteria will guide the practice of journalism,
and media will serve particular interests rather than functioning as a
“public trust.”
We will use the term instrumentalization in the pages that follow
to refer specifically to political instrumentalization. It should be noted
that media can also be “instrumentalized” for commercial purposes:
advertising is essentially this, and media organizations are often sub-
ject to broader forms of commercial instrumentalization, ranging from
more blatant examples such as product placement in film and television
programming and demands from advertisers for influence over edito-
rial content, to more subtle kinds of pressures. As we shall see there is
considerable debate about the relation between commercialization of the
media and professionalization. Some see them as essentially in harmony,
arguing that commercialization undercuts political instrumentalization.
We will generally take the view that professionalization can be threat-
enedeitherbypoliticalinstrumentalizationorbycommercialization,and
indeed in many cases by both at once.

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