Page 99 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Media and Political Systems and Differentiation

by differentiation but by de-differentiation. The nascent sphere of
“collective will-formation,” in which public issues could be discussed
and an autonomous public opinion created, emerged in the early days of
the development of liberal institutions and later collapsed into the mar-
ket as commercial mass media developed, and into the system of political
power as political parties, the state, and other large and powerful organi-
zations used their control of social resources and political power, as well
as the techniques of public relations, to dominate the process of public
communication. The de-differentiation of the public sphere is part of
what Habermas refers to as the “colonization of the lifeworld” by the sys-
tems of political and economic power. From this point of view it is not
necessarily clear that the Liberal Model – where the commercialization
of the media is much more advanced, as is the use of systematic public
relations – represents a higher level of differentiation or “modernity”
than the other models.
Bourdieu, like Habermas, shares with Parsonian systems theory the
crucial elements of the problematic of differentiation theory, derived
from Weber and Durkheim. In Bourdieu’s field theory, a “field” is a
sphere of social action with its own “rules of the game,” standards of
practice, and criteria of evaluation. To say that journalism or the media
haveemergedasafieldistosaythattheyhavebecomedifferentiatedfrom
other fields as a sphere of action. Bourdieu clearly expresses a normative
preferencefortheautonomyoffields.Hedifferentiatesfieldsintowhathe
calls “heteronomous” and “autonomous” poles, the former being those
parts of the field that are most strongly influenced by other fields.
In Bourdieu’s model total domination exists when one field dom-
inates all others and there exists only one acceptable “definition of
human accomplishment” for the entire society. A field’s autonomy
is to be valued because it provides preconditions for the full creative
process proper to each field and ultimately resistance to the “sym-
bolic violence” exerted by the dominant system of hierarchization
(Benson 1998: 465).
Bourdieu does not, however, assume an evolutionary process of de-
velopment toward greater differentiation: fields change through a pro-
cess of struggle among the agents working within them, and the direc-
tion of change is not predetermined. What has actually happened in
contemporary France, according to media scholars who have applied
Bourdieu’s theory, is that the French media field has become more dis-
tantfrom the fieldof politics butcloser totheincreasingly dominant field

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