Page 196 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

developments surely taints the picture, while at the same time providing
aframework against which to measure constellations and developments
in other world regions.

Media Globalization
The structural transformation of local media publics exhibits several
similarities, the most noteworthy being

vertical and horizontal concentration of media markets,
functional differentiation of specific media segments, and
easy-listening and consumer-oriented formats.

Underlying these broad tendencies we see specific national, regional, and
local marks that reflect frameworks set by law and politics as well as by
social and cultural identities. While globalization puts its imprint on the
local media publics of Europe and the United States, it does so through
specific venues, reproducing and sustaining remarkably different local
communication cultures. Here are three examples:
In December 2002, the German anticartel agency has nullified a co-

operation contract for production between two of the major dailies
in Germany’s capital Berlin. In the United States, such cooperation
ontheproductionfront,oftenturningatsomepointintothedemise
of one of the papers, is a publicly unquestioned part of local media
politics and considered free market self-regulation. In Germany,
the ruling of the anticartel agency argued that with the fusion of
the two production units one publishing house, the Stuttgart-based
Holtzbrinck-Group, would hold more than 50 percent of circula-
tion, and this is considered to be a threat to market competition by
the anticartelization agency.
Asecond, quite different example of such cultural embeddedness
is the discrepancy between large portions of the British daily news-
paper market and German dailies. Whereas the British local press
seems to be highly entertainment oriented and in its format in-
spired by tabloid culture, the German daily newspapers are com-
paratively more information-driven and conservative in style, with
hardly any color and much less photography. How is it that British
consumers are considered to be so much more prone toward easy-
reading formats than Germans? How did these respective media
cultures develop historically? One hypothesis is that competition
among British local media is much stiffer, due to a more diverse

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