Page 178 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

news. Even though the local daily today is not reaching as many readers,
and its readers spend less time reading the paper than watching tele-
5
vision or listening to the radio, reception studies still give the press
highest marks in terms of informational density and competence (see for
Germany, Jonscher 1991, 26; for Great Britain, similar results in Franklin
and Murphy 1991, 6–7). A number of studies about news origins support
this view and claim that the local daily remains the source for about 50
to 60 percent of all local news (for Great Britain, Franklin and Murphy
1991, 7; for Switzerland, Saxer 1986, 329; for Germany, Schwiderowski
1989, 158). Yet even though we can see some similar trends in the lo-
cal press of Western European countries and the United States, we still
lack a more substantial and comparatively tested understanding of the
arrangements between the press and the electronic media in generating
and indexing news flows in the local public sphere.

Local Radio
With the rise of radio in the 1920s, the local daily press confronted
an increasingly strong competitor for audiences and advertising rev-
enues. Depending on national regulation standards and economic inter-
ests, local radio expansion did not happen in a uniform way, but with
different models marked by top-down or bottom-up regulatory systems.
Great Britain and the United States have provided ideal types for the ini-
tial bipolar radio politics that persisted until the late 1950s and still leave
imprints today. In Great Britain, the new electronic medium was devel-
oped nationally and top down since the 1930s and, as a consequence,
“local radio virtually disappeared. What persisted was regional variation
withinwhatwasinessenceanetworkservicecontrolled,ifnotoriginated,
from London” (Crisell 1998, 25). In the United States, on the contrary,
strong local diversification of radio stations and limited national regu-
lation resulted quite early in cooperation among local stations in order
to remain economically viable (Kleinsteuber 1992, 552). The stations
within those networks remained largely independent in their political
orientation and news delivery; state regulation was basically limited to
protection of small providers from takeovers by larger conglomerates.
Network providers could, for example, only purchase a percentage of
affiliated stations and had to guarantee the journalistic independence

5 In Germany, 1970 marked the year when for the first time audiences for television were
bigger than those for the daily press. In 1985, radio surmounted the dailies as second
in the battle over audiences (see Kurp 1994, 139).

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