Page 63 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

characteristics that tend to vary together – for example, the several com-
ponentsofjournalisticprofessionalismorofpoliticalparalellism,though
we shall certainly see that they do not do so in perfectly even and pre-
dictable ways; and for example, some systems may develop some com-
ponents of journalistic professionalization more fully than others, or the
state may play a strong role in some respects and not in others. Each
of these dimensions probably also has other correlates (e.g., with char-
acteristics of news content) many of which can be identified only with
further research. We also conceive of the four dimensions as ultimately
irreducible to one another. We have argued this explicitly in the case
of journalistic professionalism and political paralellism – that the two
influence one another in important ways, but also vary independently.
We suspect that the same is probably true of any pair of dimensions. We
hope that the analysis that follows will establish the plausibility of this
framework, though clearly much more research will be needed to refine
and assess it fully.
The following chapter identifies the principal dimension of the polit-
ical system that we consider essential for comparative analysis of media
and politics, and outlines a number of hypotheses about the relations
between these variables and the media-system dimensions introduced
here.

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