Page 66 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

and we will not try to fill the gap here. But it is worth giving just a couple
of examples of the kinds of factors that may be relevant.
One extremely important factor is clearly the development of the
advertising industry, which in turn is linked to historical patterns in
the sociology of consumption and of business. Pilati (1990: 47), for
example, makes these observations about the differences between the
United States, where the use of media for marketing developed early and
strongly, and Europe:

In Europe markets have national [as opposed to continental]
dimensions which are therefore much smaller than those in
America: this means a greater cultural homogeneity and there-
fore weaker motivations to standardize collective customs through
communication; at the same time, in many cases, it confines firms
to modest dimensions which result in much lower advertising rev-
enues than those associated with larger-scale business organiza-
tion. Branding makes it possible to reduce or neutralize risks and
weaknesses resulting from the large size of American business: el-
evated organizational costs of coordination; lower levels of local
advantage; high costs of research on new products. ... [T]he range
of products which by tradition remain excluded from industrial
production (from fresh pasta to gelato and from bread to dining
out) is much larger in Europe. Also local producers, who exploit
commercial factors (capillary networks of distribution, price) and
are favored by the lesser coverage of large-scale distribution net-
works, maintain consistent operating potential.

Pilati’s point is that a variety of cultural and economic factors have
made brand-name marketing and therefore advertising less central to
European business, and this has affected the development of media in a
variety of ways. Even the prevalence of public broadcasting in Western
Europe may in part be attributed to this fact.
Another factor that we suspect is relevant is the degree of concen-
tration of capital, both in the media industry specifically and in the
economy generally. It seems likely that where capital is highly concen-
trated there will be a relatively high degree of interrelationship between
the state and media owners, either through subsidy and regulation or in
the form of clientelist ties and partisan alliances, and also – other factors
being equal – a tendency for media to be influenced by outside business
interests. We shall see in Chapter 5, for instance, that in Spain a relatively

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