Page 90 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

to the same logic, with the same kinds of relationships with the polit-
ical world. (This is one of the weaknesses of Four Theories of the Press,
which tends to assume that each society has a certain world view that
will be expressed in each element of its media system.) In most sys-
tems the press and broadcasting operate according to different logics –
the press will often be characterized by external pluralism, for exam-
ple, and broadcasting by internal pluralism. In many cases broadcasting
was deliberately organized not to follow the pattern that prevailed in
the press. Different sectors of the press often operate by different log-
ics as well – national newspapers are often more politicized, for exam-
ple, while the regional press is more strictly commercial and politically
unaligned.
Finally, it is important to keep in mind that media systems are not
static, but characterized by substantial historical change. These histor-
ical changes are not easy to represent on the tables presented here, but
they will be a central focus of the chapters that follow. Many argue, of
course, that the main historical shift underway is essentially a conver-
gence of European media systems toward the Liberal Model, a change
that has probably been underway for some time, but which has acceler-
atedgreatlysincethecommercializationofEuropeanbroadcastingbegan
in the 1980s. Certainly the three groups of countries we are discussing
differed much more dramatically in their media systems in 1970 than
they do today. We will focus on the issue of convergence in Part III.
To some extent, in Part II we will place relatively greater emphasis on
the differences among media systems, both historical and present, in an
effort to show the distinct logics of the patterns that have developed
among liberal democratic systems, which, as we argued in Chapter 1,
have never been fully conceptualized by media scholars.
Some may wonder why the models we are proposing involve geo-
graphically contiguous countries. There is certainly no reason apri-
ori that this should be true. Is it just a strange historical coincidence?
This was something that puzzled us in the early phases of the analysis:
the differentiation of media systems really did seem to follow a
geographical pattern, but we were not sure we could explain why. By
the time we had done the actual analysis, it was clear to us that there
were deep reasons for this. There were, in the first place, geographical
patterns in European historical development that accounted for the sim-
ilarities of groups of countries – Protestantism and industrialization,
for example, occurring together in the north rather than the south.
Secondly, there were important patterns of influence between different

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