Page 62 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

Laws regulating access to government information;

Laws regulating media concentration, ownership, and competition;

Laws regulating political communication, particularly during elec-

tion campaigns; and
Broadcast licensing laws and laws regulating broadcasting con-
tent, including those dealing with political pluralism, language, and
domestic content.

Inthebroadestterms,adistinctioncanbemadebetweenrelativelylib-
eral media systems, in which state intervention is limited and the media
are left primarily to market forces, and systems in which social demo-
cratic or dirigiste traditions are manifested in a larger state role in the
ownership, funding, and regulation of media. The extreme case of a lib-
eral system is of course the United States, where the unique legal priority
of the First Amendment limits many of the forms of media regulation
that are common in Europe – though we shall see that the state’s role in
the United States is quite important in its own way. There are also sub-
tler variations in the particular mixes of media policy that have evolved
in different systems, usually closely connected with broader patterns in
the relation of state and society that we will introduce in the follow-
ing chapter. Systems also vary in the effectiveness of media regulation: a
weaker state role can result either from a deliberate policy favoring mar-
ket forces or from failure of the political system to establish and enforce
media policy. This phenomenon, as we shall see, is particularly common
in the recent history of broadcasting Southern Europe; Traquina (1995)
referstoitas “savage deregulation.”
Apart from issues of media ownership, funding, and regulation, the
state always plays an important role as a source of information and
“primary definer” of news (Hall et al. 1978), with enormous influence
on the agenda and framing of public issues. These two roles are not
necessarily correlated – that is, it is not clear that the state is less a
“primary definer” in systems with liberal media policy than in systems
with a stronger state intervention in media ownership, funding, and
regulation.

CONCLUSION
We would suggest that the four dimensions outlined here cover most of
the major variables relevant to comparing the media systems of Western
Europe and North America, at least from the point of view of media and
politics. We conceive of these dimensions as clusters of media-system

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