Page 97 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Media and Political Systems and Differentiation

production is dependent on the autonomy of news media from
control by groups and institutions in other social subsystems. If
the news is controlled by political authorities it will be unable to
evaluate or characterize political events in relation to competing
political and normative perspectives. The news media must also be
independent, in a relative sense of course, of more general value-
producing institutions, like the church, university and party. Fi-
nally, there must be differentiation from structures in the economic
dimension, particularly social classes.

Alexander analyzes the development of news media in western
society – focusing particularly on the United States and France – as a
process of progressive differentiation of media from other social bodies:
political groups, the state, religion, etc. In “rational-legal societies” (in
his terms), journalism follows a path parallel to that of the state: both
struggle for their freedom of movement in relation to other social insti-
tutions. The progressive differentiation of the news media, according to
Alexander, is the consequence of three major forces: demands for more
universalistic information put forward by new social groups against
forms of advocacy journalism linked to the preexisting social order; the
growth of professional norms and self-regulation leading toward the
development of journalistic autonomy; and “the degree of universalism
in national civil cultures” (the latter, as we will try to show in subsequent
chapters, is connected with rational-legal authority, with moderate plu-
ralism, and, though less exclusively, with majoritarianism). Alexander
is also very explicit in indicating that the Liberal Model, particularly as
found in the United States, is close to the ideal of a differentiated media
system. (Notice that Luhmann, in his stress on separation of news and
opinion, seems also to endorse the Liberal Model.)
The concept of differentiation is unquestionably useful for under-
standing differences among media systems. Many of the concepts we
have employed can be connected to it. Professionalization is a central
concept in differentiation theory, and can clearly be understood in terms
of the degree of differentiation of journalism from other occupations
and forms of social practice. Many elements of political parallelism, or-
ganizational links between parties and media most obviously, can be
understood in terms of the degree of differentiation or lack of differen-
tiation between the media and the political system, though it is not clear
that any form of political parallelism can be seen as indicating a lack of
differentiation of the media system – not clear, for example, that some

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